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2 results

  • 5 - Rethinking the Islamic Republic

  • Mehran Kamrava, Georgetown University in Qatar
  • Book:
    How Islam Rules in Iran
    Published online:
    02 May 2024
    Print publication:
    09 May 2024, pp 142-201

  • Summary

    The reformist religious intellectuals of the 1990s and the 2000s sought to articulate a new jurisprudence that drew inspiration from dynamic, reason-centered ijtihad. The characteristics of the new, reconstituted fiqh were meant to include a comprehensive research program of reformism, deconstruction of commonplace understanding of religion and religion hermeneutic, and reexamining religious experiences and expectations. It was also meant to historicize religion and reimagine jurisprudence through the application of secular and scientific tools and methods. The project’s spectacular failure, slowly made clear about a decade after its zenith in the mid-2000s, owed much to the right’s merciless and multipronged onslaught. But that failure – more accurately, its violent obstruction – did not come until after the project of deconstructing hermeneutics and ijtihad had been taken to their logical extension, namely efforts to construct a sustained theory of Islamic democracy.

Presidential Elections in Iran
  • Islamic Idealism since the Revolution
  • Mahmoud Pargoo, Shahram Akbarzadeh
  • Published online:
    11 May 2021
    Print publication:
    06 May 2021
  • The dominant narrative of Iranian society and politics heralds the reformist movement as the epitome of Iran's transition to secularity, while conservative political forces are positioned as advocates of Islamization and a bulwark against secularization. Examining all the presidential elections since the revolution, Mahmoud Pargoo and Shahram Akbarzadeh argue that in contrast, political and cultural imagination and expectations in Iran have actually secularized regardless of the reformist/conservative divide. Exploring the evolution of campaign discourses from the 1980s elections which brought Abolhassan Banisadr, Mohammad-Ali Rajai and Ali Khamenei to power, to the more recent campaigns of Mohamad Khatami, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hassan Rouhani, this book suggests that current debates in Iranian domestic politics are not between secularists and their opponents, but rather, between different kinds of secular forces.