Islamic Scholars, Tradition, and the State in the Islamic Republic of Iran
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Thinking Islam: Islamic Scholars, Tradition, and the State in the Islamic Republic Of Iran Kathleen M. Foody A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Religious Studies (Islamic Studies). Chapel Hill 2012 Approved by: Carl Ernst Katherine Pratt Ewing Charles Kurzman Lauren Leve Omid Safi © 2012 Kathleen M. Foody ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT KATHLEEN M. FOODY: Thinking Islam: Islamic Scholars, Tradition, and the State in the Islamic Republic Of Iran (Under the direction of Omid Safi) This dissertation explores the intersection of secular and historically Islamic forms in Iranian debates over the role of Muslim scholars in the modern world. I draw on textual publications (both print and online) that are intended for public consumption and authored by government officials, classically-trained Islamic scholars, lay religious intellectuals, and journalists. Drawing on recent theoretical interrogations of secular universalism, as well as postcolonial and decolonial studies, I argue that the engagements of both classically-trained Islamic scholars and new religious intellectuals in Iran highlight the imbrications of the secular and the Islamic in contemporary Muslim discourse. Given these intersections, I propose in the conclusion that scholarship of Islam generally and of Muslim scholars in particular might disrupt boundaries between the academic enterprise of the Western academy and intellectual work arising elsewhere. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter One: Thinking Islam .............................................................................................. 1 Modernity and Tradition ................................................................................................. 9 Tensions in Tradition ..................................................................................................... 15 Secular Universalism and Iranian Studies .................................................................... 25 Outline of Chapters ....................................................................................................... 34 Chapter Two: Thinking Politics and Religious Authority ................................................. 38 The Guardianship of the Jurist ...................................................................................... 40 Just Hierarchies: The System and the Scholar .............................................................. 50 Just Models: Citizenship and Shiʿi History .................................................................. 57 Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 74 Chapter Three: Thinking Ethics and the Law ................................................................... 80 Islamic Law: Practice and Politics ................................................................................ 83 Religious Experience, Law, and Authority ................................................................... 87 Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 120 Chapter Four: Thinking the Scholar ............................................................................... 126 Reason, Critique, and the Public ................................................................................. 128 Critical Scholars? ........................................................................................................ 133 Islamic Argument and Secular Criticism .................................................................... 152 The Muslim Public and Secular Reason ..................................................................... 164 Epilogue .......................................................................................................................... 167 Works Cited..................................................................................................................... 181 v Chapter One: Thinking Islam One of the central questions that scholars of Islam have engaged with over the past several decades is how to represent modern Islam in relation to theories of modernity. In earlier periods, teleological understandings of modernity located Muslim- majority societies as “not yet” modern, a position that both validated colonial control of Muslim populations and outlined a unitary path for the future of those societies modeled on the European past;1 in short, becoming modern required becoming like the West. More recent scholarship has interrogated such universalist understandings of modernization. Scholars have argued instead for the inescapable modernity of Islamic forms of practice, political thought, conceptions of self, and religious debate. Scholars continue to struggle, however, to represent Islamic difference—the particularities of contemporary Islamic forms of reasoning, practice, and ways of being in world—alongside the participation and, at least partial, genesis of those forms in modernity. In this sense the study of Islam has been part of a broader trajectory in the field of religious studies, where many scholars have begun to question the universality of the concept “religion,” related categories (such as “religious experience”), and the 1 For a discussion of the relationship between modern European understandings of history, progress, and colonial rule, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe : postcolonial thought and historical difference, Princeton studies in culture/power/history (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 8- 12. imperial effects of those concepts. 2 In a 2011 address, American Academy of Religion president Kwok Pui-Lan highlighted this problem of native concepts for the study of religion. She suggested that scholars of religion now live in an interconnected world and work in academic settings which value transnational and cross-cultural collaboration.…The field of religion will have to move beyond its European and American dominance to become global in nature, asking questions about new ways of conceptualizing ‘religion’ and about religion's roles in social and economic life and global culture.3 While it would be easy to suggest that the study of Islam has always been “global in nature”, the point here is that for the most part such scholarship did not attend to the Euro-American provenance of its categories or the assumptions—embedded in Christian history—behind them. An exception, which Pui-Lan cites, was William Cantwell Smith’s The Meaning and End of Religion, published in the 1960s. Even there, however, while Smith interrogated the translatability of the category “religion” he continued to emphasize the interiority of religious experience, an assumption that marks certain Christian traditions, but is hardly universalizable.4 For the study of modern Islam, a key problem is how to represent the imbrications 2 For a review of pertinent literature in the field, see Kwok Pui-lan, "2011 Presidential Address: Empire and the Study of Religion," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 80, no. 2 (2012): 285-303. Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The meaning and end of religion; a new approach to the religious traditions of mankind (New York,: Macmillan, 1963). 3 Pui-lan, "2011 Presidential Address: Empire and the Study of Religion," 295-96. 4 Smith, The meaning and end of religion; a new approach to the religious traditions of mankind. For a critical reading of Smith, see Talal Asad, "Reading a Modern Classic: W.C. Smith’s ‘The Meaning and End of Religion," History of Religions 3(2001). 2 of historically Islamic forms of thought and practice with concepts and practices that arise out of modern and specifically colonial-era shifts. Muslim scholarship in particular—whether the writings of new kinds of intellectuals arising out of universities or classically-trained Islamic scholars (the ʿulamaʾ) linked to the madrasa system — presents difficulties for distinguishing and separating out concepts and categories unique to Islam; that is, specifically Islamic modes of reasoning. This difficulty in large part revolves around Muslim incorporation of and thinking about specifically modern social and political forms, including the state, society, the public, citizens, and concurrent constructions of the individual subject. One reaction to such Muslim thinking is to identify “good” forms of “liberal” Islam, forms of Islamic thought that seem to align with democratic projects, the protection of minorities, equal rights for women, etc. At the same time, scholars worry that valorizing liberal Islam uncritically universalizes liberal norms and does violence against “traditionalist” Muslims who “‘except Islamic authority with few questions,’” but “‘do not generally favor violence and terrorism.’”5 In this dissertation I explore the possibilities of separating out and distinguishing Islamic and secular, or Western, concepts and categories in contemporary Muslim thinking. I engage with recent work in the study of Islam that posits Western secularity and Islamic ways of life as distinct discursive traditions and compare those academic presentations to the ways in which contemporary Muslim scholars engage with the present. In particular, I explore contestations over what constitutes the Islamic tradition itself by tracing public debates over the place of Islamic history and scholarship in contemporary Iran.