Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution

Notes

Notes 1. Culture, History, and Politics 1. Michele de Angelis has drawn my attention to the fact that the formula "two things are divided and make three, three ... five ..." also is a venerable one, used in early Islamic disputations on God's power of efficient causality, which resides in his being and cannot be said to be divisible lest God's unity and omnipotence be denied. The argument can be found, among other places, in Kulayni's al-Kafi, Ibn Babuya's Tawhid, and Tabarsi's Ihtijaj. 2. For a superb introduction to this tradition, see Hans-Georg Gadamer's Truth and Method (New York: Seabury, 1975); also Rudolf A. Makkreel, Dilthey: Philosopher ofthe Human Sciences (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975). In recent years the French have appropriated the tradition, especially Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, Paul Ricoeur, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault. American anthropologists received the tradition initially , somewhat bowdlerized, from the students of Franz Boas and from Talcott Parsons, then more accurately from G. H. Mead, later Clifford Geertz, and now through the French philosophers. Two recent surveys of social science use of the tradition may be found in A. Giddens, New Rules ofSociological Method (New York: Basic Books, 1976), and Z. Bauman, Hermeneutics and Social Science (London: Heinemann, 1978); see also Fischer (1977b). 3. These definitions and their uses will be familiar to readers of the so-called Chicago school of symbolic anthropology, particularly the work of David M. Schneider, Clifford Geertz, and Victor Turner. 4. Akhavi (1980), Algar (1969, 1972), Binder (1966), Browne (1910, 1918), Ferdows (1967), Fischer (1973), Garoussian (1974), Ha'iri (1973), Kasravi (1951), Keddie (1966a,b, 1972), Lambton (1962, 1964, 1965), Thaiss (1973). 5. Lambton (1964), Algar (1969), Keddie (1969). 6. According to Shi'ites, political and religious leadership of the community of Muslims was supposed to pass from the Prophet Muhammad to his son-in-law 265 266 Notes to pages 6-13 and cousin, 'Ali, and thence through 'Ali's male descendants. There were twelve of these successors, called Imams. 7. Amr bi ma'ruf va nahy az munkar. 8. According to Sunnis, political and religious leadership of the community of Muslims properly passed from the Prophet Muhammad to elected successors: Abu Bakr, 'Umar, 'Uthman, and then 'Ali. Sunni and Shi'ite groups differed in their later notions of caliphate and imamate, but both tended to recognize the principle that bad government is preferable to no government. See Gibb (1962) and Lambton (1962). 9. It is sometimes claimed that there is a Persian pre-Islamic tradition of unity of church and state, stemming from the Sassanian dynasty, which remains influential , and which both Safavid and Qajar dynasties in slightly different ways drew upon in trying to legitimize their authority as divinely blessed. It is at least interesting, given those who claim Shi'ism doctrinally denies legitimacy to any temporal ruler, that Shi'ite theologians often granted legitimacy to governments as Muhammad-Baqir Majlisi (d. 1700) did for the Safavids and as Mirza Muhammad-Husayn Na'ini did for Reza Shah in 1925. 10. The term "thick description" is appropriated from the philosopher Gilbert Ryle by Clifford Geertz (1973) in a sophisticated but disturbing major statement on the potentials of ethnography. While on the one hand Geertz increases the sophistication of his handling of signification and cultural communication over his earlier notions of a system of symbols, on the other hand he turns away from the larger historical and sociological contexts which save thick description from triviality. It is unsatisfactory to plead division of labor with other social scientists when what is at issue in both the description of, and the theoretical accounting for, culture is the historical and structural (tropic) dimensions of the forms being explored. 11. I do not mean to sound overly complacent. Fundamentalism in the United States is enjoying a minor upsurge and the most positivist of scientists admit that science goes but so far, beyond which metaphysical notions are unavoidable. But the rhetoric of discussion is ecumenical and nonparochial, as the fundamentalist religious rhetorics of a century ago were not. This is largely due to political accommodation and what Robert Bellah calls the institution of "civil religion" (1967). Jewish, Protestant, and Catholic theologians and leaders are able to speak to each other in the neutral metalanguage of systematic theology, that is, in a language reflecting upon the language of religion (see The Royal Institute of Philosophy, 1969). In Iran such a disinterested mode of...