The End of Islamic Ideology - Iran

Social Research, Summer, 2000 by Hamid Dabashi

Shi'ism as Paradox

But all is not emancipatory revolt in Shi'ism. Precisely the same insurrectionary disposition that inaugurates Shi'ism into history constitutes its Achilles Heel. Shi'ism is predicated on a paradox: It fails upon success, just like the Sisyphus. Shi'ism is a religion of protest. It can never succeed. As soon as it succeeds politically, it negates itself metaphysically. Its material success is its moral failure. The success of the Islamic Revolution in Iran over the last two decades is the most recent example marking its political predicament that when it has succeeded politically it has, ipso facto, reversed its own legitimacy. Shi'ism cannot be turned into an official ideology of repression without immediately negating its own very reason for being. The key operative concept constitutional to Shi'ism is that of mazlumiyyat, "having been wronged," or "having been tyrannized." The paradigmatic expression of this key operative concept is the Third Shi'i martyred Imam, alHusayn, whose very honorific appellation is Husayn-e Mazlum ("Husayn the Tyrannized"). So far as Shi'ism is on the side of the oppressed it is in its full revolutionary blossoming. The instant that it becomes fully institutionalized into an apparatus of power it ipso facto mutates into a most brutal theocratic tyranny. All its revolutionary zeal now comes back to haunt and turn it into a monstrous negation of itself. This is the defining moment of Shi'ism because it has never surpassed its Karbala Paradox. Not now, not ever. The defeat of the Third Shi'i Imam in the Battle of Karbala in 680 is constitutional to its moral and material culture. If Imam Husayn had succeeded in Karbala, Shi'ism would have had an entirely different disposition vis-a-vis political power. The defeat of Imam Husayn in the Battle of Karbala has made Shi'ism both a religion of protest and a moral manifesto against all successful constitutions of power. Shi'ism covets what it cannot attain, and thus it is a religion of protest. Shi'ism cannot attain what it covets, and thus it is a moral manifesto against all political power. Between those two normative opposites, Shi'ism dwells as a paradox.

The result of this paradox has been the historical formation of Shi'i dynasties that in their very institutional claim to power have lost all their charismatic claim to authority. The Islamic Republic in Iran is not the first instance when the mutation of Shi'ism from revolutionary protest to dominant state ideology has robbed it of its own critical claim to legitimacy. As early as the early part of the Tenth Century, the Hamdanid dynasty of Mosul (904-991) and Aleppo (944991) had claim to a Shi'i state religion. So did the Buyids in Iran and Iraq (923-1055). The Fatimid dynasty of Egypt (909-1171) extended the Isma'ili branch of Shi'ism and institutionalized its power over much of North Africa. If these Shi'i dynasties did not have their own internal sectarian and political differences they would have completely taken over the entire medieval Islamic world from the Sunnite majority. Places as far West as Iraq and Syria, as far North as Azarbaijan and Mazandaran, as far East as Deccan, Lucknow, and Kashmir in India, and as far South as Bahrain and other Persian Gulf regions came under the full political power of one Shi'i dynasty or another throughout the medieval world. But no dynasty ever reached the paramount power of the Safavid Empire that ruled over a major segment of the Islamic world from the dusk of the medieval world in 1501 to the dawn of Modernity in 1722. These successive and simultaneous dynasties drained every ounce of revolutionary energy from the creative memory of Shi'ism. In the repressive measures of these imperial powers, Shi'ism became an effective state ideology and all but lost its defining doctrinal moments. In becoming the state religion of reigning tyrannies, Shi'ism does not as much forget as dis-remember itself. In these dynastic formations, Shi'ism became an historical antithesis of itself, a contradiction in terms, an oxymoronic self-negation, a paradox. If and when it succeeds politically it fails, ipso facto, metaphysically. Its material victory is its moral defeat.