Islamic Reformers Are Meeting Opposition

​​The Centre for the Dialogue between Civilisations is a state organisation with the task of promoting dialogue between the cultures of the world. Two months ago it invited a number of Iranian and foreign academics to a seminar in Teheran under the title "Islam and Modernity".

It wasn't a new topic. The debate has been going on for about a hundred years. The guests were well-known only in intellectual and academic circles, and it was assumed that the seminar would take place without much interest being shown by the public and with little media coverage.

But a fierce dispute between two scholars over a purely theoretical issue on the fringes of the seminar was quickly taken up by the parliament, the mosques, the religious colleges, the media, the universities and those in power in the country.

Laicism versus Islamic democracy

One of the scholars who had been invited to the conference, Dr. Abdolkarim Sorush, was unable to take part himself after he had received threatening calls from members of the secret services. His lecture had to be read for him. Over the last few years, Sorush has been opposing the view that political and economic models can be taken form the Koran and thus laying down a challenge for fundamentalists who believe that religious law and Islamic government can be turned into reality.

​​At the same time, by supporting the idea of Islamic democracy, he has set himself apart from the laicist forces who want to see a division between church and state and who promote the idea of a parliamentary system.

In the time of the Shah, Sorush was on the side of the fundamentalists. In the first years after the Revolution, he held important positions, and was, for example, responsible for the purging of non-religious professors from the universities. After a while he began to distance himself from the fundamentalists. He developed new ideas and became one of the most important thinkers among the religious reformers. In political terms, he supported the former president, Mohammad Khatami and the politically reformist wing, most of whose leaders had been his students and disciples.

The reason for the non-attendance of the second guest, Professor Seyyed Hossein Nasr, one of the most prominent contemporary scholars of Islam, was never given. Nasr studied Muslim and Western philosophy, among other subjects, at American elite universities, such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, as well as at the most important Iranian theological colleges and with the leading religious authorities.

Nasr has written significant works on Muslim and Western philosophy in English, Arabic and Persian and has held professorships at leading American universities, and during the rule of the Shah, he headed one of the most important Iranian universities. And he was one of the most influential members of the office of Farah Diba, the powerful wife of Mohammad Reza Shah.

Fundamental criticism of Islamic reformers

As a representative of the old regime, Nasr was subjected to persecution by the ruling clergy after the Revolution. He moved back to the USA and resumed teaching at universities. While the first generation of revolutionary leaders among the conservative clergy demanded the killing of Nasr (and still do so), some of the second generation of the ruling class in the Islamic Republic, like Dr Hodad Adel, the current speaker of parliament and son-in-law of the religious leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, actually found their way to Nasr's classes, and boast proudly nowadays that they are among his students.

In a contentious interview, Nasr was asked what he thought of the work and ideas of religious reformers like Sorush. He compared him to second-rate Western intellectuals who know neither Islam or the West. He argued that intellectual attempts by Muslim reformers to reconcile Islam and modernity would lead only to the hollowing out of Islam and the removal of its foundations.

Nasr put forward the view that it's the modern world which has to adapt to Islam and not the other way round. One of the objectives of the Koran is the creation of an Islamic society. Such a society would have an Islamic government based on the laws of the Koran and the Sunna of the Prophet, and lead people along the path to a satisfying life filled with meaning.

Western humanism, rationalism and liberalism, he argues, have placed common sense and the decision of the majority in place of God, faith and the eternal laws. Such a reversal of tradition has put a distance between God and man. The attempts of the reformers to reconcile the Koran with such ideas as human rights or parliamentary government are movements away from the religion.

Nasr is seen by all the religious elements, including the reformers, as the most important contemporary scholar of Islam. Religious reformers have been angered by his attack on them, as well as by his acknowledgement of a fundamentalist interpretation of the Koran. The shock sits deeper, since the attack came, not as usual from the traditionalist clergy, but from a graduate of Harvard and MIT, a scholar of Islam who is respected in Western academic circles like almost no other.

The traditionalist view of the conservatives

Sorush and the reformers find few convincing arguments for their views in the sources. They argue against Nasr mainly on political terms. They try to restrict the effect of what he has to say by pointing to the negative effects of traditionalism in society in practical terms.

In his speech at the "Hosseiniyeh Ershad", a religious institute in Teheran, Sorush describes Nasr's views as traditionalist, and argues that traditionalism leads to fundamentalism, which in turn nourishes terrorism. Sorush refers to Nasr's latest book, "Amre Qudsi" ("The holy sphere"), and describes Nasr as a man who once set up his telescope in Farah Diba's office, in an attempt to find the holy sphere in the courtly heaven. By linking Nasr with the regime of the Shah Sorush is trying to bring the traditionalists out against him.

Nasr is attacking the religious reformers at a time when they have been weakened both on the ideological as well as on the political front. Politically, they've lost the presidency, the majority in parliament, and the support of the majority of the population to their opponents.

Compatibility of Islam and modernity being tested

The most important theses of the religious reformers – the possibility of an Islamic democracy and the compatibility of Islam and modernity – have failed the test of practice. The contradiction between the views of the reformers and the clear statements of Islamic law in the Koran have knocked the theoretical basis out from under them. The Muslim world has increasingly moved towards the forces of conservatism. The reformers have been pushed to the margins, and their influence in Muslim society is restricted to a few intellectual circles.

The far-reaching reactions to this theoretical debate and the presence of an influential thinker like Nasr, a scholar of Islam whom the reformers and pragmatists see as their intellectual enemy and whom the traditionalists threaten with the death sentence, shows that the division in the ruling wing of the conservatives into two camps is now complete.

On the one hand there are the traditionalist conservatives of the old guard, and on the other the radical fundamentalists of the second generation. From now, instead of three wings ruling Iran – the Islamic conservatives, the pragmatists and the reformers – there are four.

The fourth wing, the second generation of Muslim radicals in Iran, lived its youth during the Revolution and the eight-year-long war against Iraq. After the war they took advantage of the weakness of their opponents and claimed most of the positions of power with slogans about the return to revolutionary Islam and populist policies.

To clothe their radical positions in Islamic costume, they need a ideologist like Nasr, who knows more about Islam than most of the high-ranking clergy, who knows the West better than the religious reformers, and who defends a return to the pure Islamic values and an Islamic government. Without doubt, Nasr's positions have reinforced the lost confidence of a generation which sees itself as the bearers of a divine commission and as soldiers in a holy war.

Faraj Sarkohi

© Qantara.de 2006

Translated from the German by Michael Lawton

Qantara.de

Election of the Assembly of Experts in Iran
High-Stakes Power Struggle with the Supreme Leader
With their growing influence in the Assembly of Experts, radical Islamic forces are seeking confrontation with conservative pragmatists and thereby even putting pressure on the religious leader Ali Khamenei. By Faraj Sarkohi

Abdolkarim Sorush
For an Open Interpretation of the Koran
The reformist thinker and philosopher Abdolkarim Soroush is one of a new generation of theologians that openly speaks out in favour of human rights and secularism in Iran. Katajun Amirpur about an awkward Iranian intellectual

Dossier
Reformist Islam
What possibilities does Islam offer for the reform and democratisation of modern Muslim societies? Qantara.de presents the opinions and initiatives of renowned thinkers from the Islamic world