The End of Islamic Ideology - Iran

Social Research, Summer, 2000 by Hamid Dabashi

Because it has been the historical Other of Islam itself (as Sunnism), Shi'ism can scarcely conceal its dream of being the Same. But being the Same, whether represented in the dynastic apparatus of the Safavids or the scholastic apparatus of Mulla Sadra's Transcendental Theosophy, ipso facto disqualifies Shi'ism from Shi'ism. Shi'ism has to always remain the Other and yet dream of the Same. When it becomes the Same it atrophies into its own nightmare. This is exactly the opposite of what Levinas detected as the primacy of the Same in what he would call "the Western Metaphysics," and identify with Socrates: "This primacy of the same was Socrates' teaching: to receive nothing of the Other but what is in me, as though from all eternity I was in possession of what comes to me from the outside--to receive nothing, or to be free."(16) Whereas Levinas' counter-metaphysics is to re-constitute the primacy of the Other, as the site of morality (for him located in the naked face of the Other), against a history of the primacy of the Same, he never paid any attention to what would happen to a metaphysics that narrates itself as the Other of a reigning the Same. The paradoxical history of Shi'ism is a good lesson in the equally pathological primacy of the Other dreaming of being the Same. Shi'ism is the Other. Shi'ism is Alterity. By virtue of its own historical roots, it has always been the Islamic Other, dreaming of itself as the Same. The mere assumption or even illusion of power gives Shi'ism a sense of political Identity and ipso facto it loses its sense of historical Alterity. Shi'ism can never be the Same. It has believed in its own Otherness. Before the first slogan or bullet is shot against a Shi'i government, it has lost its own legitimacy by being a "government," and thus having an exclusive claim on legitimate violence. The Shi'i claim on any "Islamic Republic" is always tangential, paradoxical, an antithesis running before its own thesis, never near a synthesis. The Shi'is are the Jews of Islam, the Other that proves the Same. The opposition between Shi'i Fundamentalism and Jewish Zionism is not the opposition between two oppositional identities, but the opposition between two identical Others, identical in their Alterity.

Two Cataclysmic Events

A succession of political events over the course of the 19th century, in the form of a conversation between Shi'ism and the onslaught of colonialism,(17) ultimately culminated in two cataclysmic courses of insurrectionary movements that marked and for ever changed the history of Shi'ism. One is domestic to Iranian Shi'ism and marks the last pre-modern revolution that tested the doctrinal boundaries of the faith, while the other confronted Shi'ism full-fledged with the colonially mitigated project of Modernity. The first, the Babi movement of 1844-1850, carried Shi'ism to one of its most radical doctrinal conclusions, while the second, the Constitutional Revolution of 1906-1911, cauterized the predicament of Modernity on its forehead. What the active participation of the Shi'i clerics in the Qajar frontier wars with the Russians in the first three decades of the Nineteenth century reveals, as does public uprising against the Reuter and Tobacco concessions in the last three decades of the century, is the resurgence of the Shi'i conscience collective as a religion of protest. No particular class, least of all the Shi'i clerical elite, was in total control of this insurrectionary conscience collective. It had a reality sui generis and it invested and divested power and authority on revolutionary figures and momentums that remained loyal to its hopes and aspirations. What the Babi Movement of the middle of the century and the Constitutional Revolution of the end/beginning of the century ultimately reveal is how as soon as the insurrectionary spirit of Shi'ism degenerates in one case it resuscitates itself in another. As soon as the Babi movement of the middle of the century degenerates into the Baha'i religion, the Constitutional Revolution of the end of the century becomes the repository of all the hopes and aspirations that were brutally murdered with the execution of Bab in 1850. The collective spirit of protest that is in Shi'ism in its most insurrectionary moments divests its aspirations from the lofty but irrelevant megalomaniac claims of Baha'ullah and invests them in local and anonymous figures far closer to their miseries and hopes. The Constitutional Revolution thus rises like a sphinx from the ashes of the Babi Movement.(18)