By Mona Sarkis
Professor Ghamari-Tabrizi, you say that the West doesn't pay enough attention to one significant development in Iran, namely the pragmatic political dealings of Islam. What do you mean by that?
Ghamari-Tabrizi: The Islamic Revolution put an end to the secular system and by doing so, automatically put the dogma of Islam into a position where it was constantly contested because Islam had to stay abreast of political reality. As a result, we are seeing less an Islamicization of society and more a transformation of Islam. This was not an intentional consequence of the Islamic revolution, but I think it is its most profound consequence.
This undoubtedly led to enormous fighting in clerical and political circles.
Ghamari-Tabrizi: The confusion was and is enormous. I remember one very funny incident. When Ruhollah Khomeini set up the Expediency Discernment Council of the System in 1988 so that it would mediate between the Guardian Council, which focuses on religion, and the parliament, Ayatollah Emami Kashani, who was both a member of the Guardian Council and the Expediency Discernment Council, got quite frustrated and said to Khomeini:
"I am so confused. In the morning I go to the Guardian Council and safeguard the interests of Islam and in the evening I go to the Expediency Council and safeguard the interests of the state. Which has priority?" Khomeini replied: "The evening. Forget about your role in the morning."
This is a very revolutionary thing for the Supreme Leader of the Revolution to say. It almost sounds like a return to secularism.
Ghamari-Tabrizi: Khomeini set a process in motion that is extremely hard to contain, and as early as 1981, Ayatollah Bayat made use of the term "secularism" when he predicted to Khomeini that the politicization of Islam would lead to a "secular" view.
Yet another example demonstrates how far the Supreme Leader went: when in 1988 a labour law was passed that was good for employees but impeded investments, Khomeini was criticized on the basis that Islam respects private property and that he had, consequently, no right to impede investments.
His response was to say that after the revolution, Islamic governance became the primary creed of Islam. Only two years after the revolution, he wrote to the then Speaker of Parliament, saying that only a two-thirds majority in parliament decides what is Islam.
What impact did this move towards secularism have on society? Would it be correct to say that there was a certain diminution of religiousness?
Ghamari-Tabrizi: It depends on how you define religiousness. The West focuses on the capital Tehran and on young men with gelled hair and women wearing tons of make-up. Even so, many of them say their daily prayers. Shiite Islam is above all an Iranian Islam and completely different from Arab-Sunni Islam. For example, everybody in the Islamic world marks his religious holidays as the major ones, except Iranians.
Iran's New Year falls in the spring and dates back to a farming culture that prevailed around the time of the Achaemenid (559–330 BC) when spring was of special economic relevance. So pre-Islamic pagan rituals still play a central role. To the West as well as to Sunnis, this seems contradictory, but not to Iranians.
Another difference between Sunnism and Shiism is that the latter emphasises "ijtihad", the ongoing reinterpretation of the Koran and the Sunna. Is this another reason why we will not see this pragmatic approach to Islam in Sunni Arab countries?
Ghamari-Tabrizi: Shiism never closed the "gates of ijtihad" and it has a clerical hierarchy that gives much more weight to the fatwas of Shiite clerics than those of Sunnis. But the decisive factor is the mixing of politics and religion in Iran. This puts Islam in a continuous frame of reference for social policy decisions. And this actually leads to the great irony that turns everything on its head.
In Arab countries that are formally secular, there is ultimately far less room for an innovative, creative Islamic jurisprudence than in the self-declared Islamic Republic of Iran, which has, since 1979, no matter what government was in place, demonstrated a tremendously vibrant hermeneutic interpretation of Islam.
Mona Sarkis
© Qantara.de 2009
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