9 - 15 August 2001
Issue No.546
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 9 - 15 August 2001 Issue No.546 |
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Happiness in many forms
Intellectual Discourse and the Politics of Modernization: Negotiating Modernity in Iran, Ali Mirsepassi, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000. pp227
Now we understand how local events turn into global world history. The recent re-election of the philosophy professor, transformed into the president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Khatami, by an even wider margin than in the 1997 election, is such an event. Yet, we must ask ourselves how a person such as Khatami is possible in post- revolutionary Iran? How is Iran's revolution to be understood in terms of modern history, not to mention Hegelian-style world history? Does Max Weber still have something to say to us about the role and function of charisma in public life? Or, are the traditional sociological and political-science categories that we find in standard college textbooks adequate to understanding modern- day Iran? Lastly, what sort of revolution was it that occurred in Iran, compared to the French and the Russian versions? So many questions, and so few answers. Yet, there are sensitive scholars who are trying to tackle the phenomenon of Iran.
This book by Ali Mirsepassi, professor of sociology at Hampshire College, Amherst, Massachusetts, USA, is a sensitive treatment of a complex modern problem. At the outset Mirsepassi, an Iranian living in the United States, is well acquainted with the subject matter at hand, and he is equally well suited to dealing with it. Not only literary sources, but also interviews with appropriate scholars and persons in Iran are used in the book, and the volume's historical contextualising, which includes analogies of place and situation between early twentieth-century Germany and late twentieth-century Iran, makes this study an exciting, interesting and provocative work. The failure by the so-called experts on Iran, as well as by the Soviet Union, to understand, not to mention predict a quasi- religious revolution in the country in 1979, as well as a secular collapse, is painstakingly noted. The author's viewpoint is that "the ideology of the Iranian Revolution, when viewed in detail, emerges less as a monolithic clash between 'modernity' and 'tradition', than as an attempt to actualize a modernity accommodated to national, cultural and local experiences." In short, the categories of analysis that we tend to use, inherited from classical sociology and from statistical data, do not fit well with events in Iran since 1979.
True, the central topic is the process of modernisation that has been going on in Iran since the early twentieth century, yet the dichotomy between "modern" and "traditional," not to mention old-style talk about imperialism and new-style rhetoric of "the Other," does not do justice to the complex situation in contemporary Tehran. Modernity, in its liberal enlightenment form and promoted by a Western Lebensstil ["life-style"] to use Dilthey's term, is not inevitable. On the contrary, Iran's example seems to show that alternative modernities may be on the horizon, minus the ideological underpinnings. A population that is 75 per cent under the age of 30 has other things to do than worry about ideological and postmodernist fashions. Such people want jobs, personal dignity, freedom of speech, and to put it simply, a little fun in life. Islam, in their view, need not be a stern, cemetery affair. Present- day Iran, as this reviewer well knows, in this concurring with the author, is anything but a cemetery. On the contrary, philosophical discussions that could be risky elsewhere are well and bubbling.
This reviewer, lecturing at Tabatabii University, Al-Zahara Women's College and at the Academy of Philosophy, as well as at a cultural institute in Qom only two months ago, can testify that the sensitivity and sharp-mindedness of at least Iran's academic youth is highly encouraging. Questions about the nature of humankind, questions about personal freedom, questions about the just state, questions about philosophy and its relation to Islam, questions about what young people in Western societies actually think and really want, questions about the Internet and moral applicability, not to mention questions on happiness, took this reviewer at times by surprise. Mirsepassi dispels, and rightfully so, the stereotypical image of Iran that people may form from the few minutes given that country in international news broadcasts.
Iran, no doubt, is a positive challenge for anyone with a sensitive mind and soul who wants to explore the relationship between spirituality, politics, sociology and economics. It may sound curious to those who think of politics in categories of Realpolitik and of wheeling and dealing, but Plato and imaginative ideas of what sort of society could emerge in Iran are very much on the mind of Iran's re-elected philosopher president.
In his book Mirsepassi gives the reader a balanced picture of the forces and elements that have shaped the country, from the Tobacco Revolt, the Constitutional Movement of 1905 and Mosaddeq's nationalisation of oil to the events leading up to the return of Ayatollah Khomeni. He gives us, in precise summary, a view of ideological fighters, such as Jalal Al-e Ahmad and Ali Shariati, who prepared the ground for the massive critique of Western interference in Iran's affairs. This was a critique of the deformation of cultural forms that developed in old Persia and still had some life in it in the mid-twentieth century. It was Critique in the positive sense given to the word by the young Marx, and it included the critique of the machine in terms reminiscent of Heidegger, showing how such a society led to the disintegration of human relations and to forms of neurotic behaviour. The Left in Iran, however, were ignorant of Political Islam, and in this they were as blind as the Shah. Mirsepassi puts this correctly when he writes that "the Revolution was far from an exclusively Islamic phenomenon ... the Islamists proved themselves to be far more pragmatic in political thinking than the Left itself."
It is clear that what has happened and is happening in Iran is of great concern to all of us, and especially to Middle Eastern peoples, since it forces the coming to terms with a basic contradiction that is not easily resolved. This is: how can a "natural order" made up of family, clan, tribe, ethnicity and religion, which are basically pre-modern sociological associations, be made to square with a dynamic modernity that emphasises personal freedom over the community, freedom of speech, the fundamental rights of human beings, respect for the individual man and woman, the promotion of educational bildung [formation of character] and the fulfillment of people's potential irrespective of their specific ethnicity, class, or religion.
Happiness comes in many forms, and there is no doubt that the people of Iran are seeking kinds of happiness that are contrary to certain traditional beliefs. After all, does not humankind now try to aspire to kinds of happiness undreamed of only a few generations ago? Could we imagine an Islamic Faust? The newly re-elected Iranian president had called for a "dialogue of civilisations," which seems to be taking place in sensitive quarters despite the vulgar pictures we see on our television screens. However, will we have to wait forever for Godot? Iran wants to offer us an alternative; this book gives us an excellent guide as to how the discussion could proceed, and we must wait and see how it will play itself out.
Reviewed by Ernest Wolf-Gazo
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