Democracy in Modern Iran: Islam, Culture, and Political Change

Conclusion: Modernity and Its Traditions

| 185 Conclusion Modernity and Its Traditions Iranians are experiencing their own modernity at a time when the very paradigm of modernity is being radically questioned in the West, its place of origin. The modern history of Iran reveals a fascinating diversity of narratives that reckon with the nation’s particular and often troubled experience of transition to a modern nation-state in the context of globalization, a nation-state often fraught with the perils and seductions of modernity as an absolute epistemological category, and a nation-state being reclaimed by nativist forces and ideologies, going through dictatorship and violent revolution in a national quest to give shape to democratic modernity in the Iranian context. From the kaleidoscopic point of view of the present, looking back over the multiple roads and question marks of modern Iranian history, we must ask how we may produce a narrative of modernity that can at once critique Iran’s traditional concepts and institutions and take account of the shortcomings in the received paradigm of modernity. Then, facing the roads to the future, we must ask which of them will help us overcome the shortcomings of both national tradition and the universal experience of modernity as we have so far known it. To commence such a discussion, it is necessary at the outset to elucidate the meaning of modernity and post-modernity as these concepts are used in both the contemporary intellectual worlds of Iran and of the West. Here we confront two received models: the “abstract” and the “sociological.” The task of choosing the one or the other is not easy, particularly because the choice is between a concept rooted in certain venerable European philosophical traditions of “universalism,” and the very motor of much political thought and practice in the shaping of modern nation-states both in the West and elsewhere, and a concept experienced in the particular temporal passage of modern societies all over the world. As a fully conceptualized idea, the sociological model is in many ways a reaction to the titanic ambitions and lamen- 186 | Conclusion: Modernity and Its Traditions table failings of the abstract model. The totalizing abstract view is a universal historical blueprint-cum-Eurocentric prejudice exposed by the very application of critical reason fostered by the Enlightenment. It was prompted as well by the bitter and violent historical experiences of national projects of modernization which failed in their democratic promise. By dint of these experiences , we have witnessed a plurality of historical rationalities or cultural logics of modernity, which have led at times to dangerous political dead ends and at others to unanticipated promise. But in all cases the plurality of modern experiences goes beyond the limits of the European universalist imagination in its grandly linear and essentially Hegelian historicist framework. A glimpse at this vista refers us to the pathbreaking work of Marshall Berman , whose All That Is Solid Melts into Air, leads implicitly to the conclusion that if modernity is not an “abstract project,” then, although certainly rooted historically in the desires of the West, it can never be limited in meaning by Western narratives of modernity. To even begin conceptualizing modernity as it presently exists we must take into account the great diversity and heterogeneity of experiences in the numerous societies engaged in working toward modernity and making it a global phenomenon. If we do, it would not be long before we met with the incommensurable textures of modern experience which necessarily give the concept of modernity greater definition. We may ask, for example, whether Foucault’s critiques of nineteenth-century Europe in terms of the asylum, the hospital, the prison, and so forth can be fruitfully applied to Iran in the modern context. In a study of the Iranian legal system and its shortcomings, for instance, can we argue, on the basis of Foucault’s theories, that the Iranian legal system, a product of modernity, has already crossed the threshold into the realm of post-modernity? And does this evidence point to the failure of modernity as such? To such a query I would reply in the negative, for in the Iranian case we have yet to establish our position in relation to modernity. This insight teaches us that the weakness of modernity in one place does not mean we have reached a dead end in another place. At the same time, Foucault’s analytical techniques, the archeological and genealogical critiques, may be very helpful in critically engaging the prevailing collective understanding of modernity in...