Iran, in Search of a Nonsecular and Nontheocratic Politics
One does not have to be in solidarity with them [the opponents of a regime]. One does not have to maintain that these confused voices sound better than the others and express the ultimate truth. For there to be a sense in listening to them and in searching for what they want to say, it is sufficient that they exist and that they have against them so much which is set up to silence them.
— Michel Foucault, “On Revolution”
The Iranian revolution of 1978–79 was the culmination of a gradual rejection of the shah’s domestic policies — including his authoritarian secularism — and of foreign, especially American, influence in Iran. Revolutionaries of different persuasions, who might be labeled secular, religious, or neither — our categories fail us here — all opposed the shah’s state-imposed secularization and modernization. According to Martin Amis, “The 1979 revolution wasn’t an Islamic revolution until it was over.”1 The hard-line clerics who assumed power replaced an imperial form of secular modernity with an imperial form of religious modernity. So Iran went from temporal to theocratic absolutism, in the words of Said Arjomand.2
Recent events in Iran suggest that neither absolutism is sustainable. Many Iranians have clung, like Michel Foucault, to something different and hopeful for the past thirty years,3 and last summer they took to the streets in support of it. On one level, then, the protests of 2009 concern which of two revolutionary political camps that took shape in the early 1980s will prevail: the hard-liners or their rivals, with the latter represented by Mir Hussein Moussavi and the demonstrators. But on another level the unrest signals much more than that: a broad debate since the early days of the revolution over what it means to be an Islamic republic or, quite possibly, something different.
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Notes
Parts of this essay draw on “Contested Secularisms in Turkey and Iran,” chap. 4 of my book The Politics of Secularism in International Relations (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008).
- Martin Amis, “The End of Iran’s Ayatollahs?” Guardian, July 17, 2009, www.guardian.co.uk/ world/2009/jul/17/martin-amis-iran.
- Said Arjomand, The Turban for the Crown: The Islamic Revolution in Iran (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 89.
- Bonnie Honig, “What Foucault Saw at the Revolution: On the Use and Abuse of Theology for Politics,” Political Theory 36 (2008): 309.