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Reviewed by:
  • Iran’s Intellectual Revolution
  • Alireza Shomali (bio)
Iran’s Intellectual Revolution, by Mehran Kamrava. Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. xi + 268 pages. Tables. Bibl. to p. 227. Index to p. 262. $90 cloth; $32.99 paper.

Mehran Kamrava investigates an intellectual revolution that “silently” contributes to the emergence of a new era of the Iranians’ mentality and socio-political life. He identifies three different but overlapping discourses which, together, comprise the contemporary intellectual phenomena in Iran.

The conservative religious discourse regards Islam as more than a mere set of moral and ethical principles. It believes in the exclusive right and responsibility of the jurists to implement the political rules of Islam. It rejects the rights of the people to initiate the law and choose their leaders, and, as a result, the conservative religious discourse locates the theory of the Absolute Guardianship of the Jurist at the heart of Islam.

The reformist religious discourse seeks a rational analysis of Islam, criticizes prevailing social and political relations, and stays committed to the three key values of freedom, equality, and progress. It promotes a non-revolutionary Islam compatible with democracy, human rights, and religious pluralism. It also strives for separation between religious and political institutions.

Finally, the secularist-modernist discourse underlines individualism, critiques the dominant understanding of the West, advances social and political developments, defends civil society, and advocates secularism. Kamrava offers a remarkably detailed hermeneutical account of each discourse and shares with his readers a revealing view of the contemporary Iranian intellectual landscape. Absent from this view, however, is the contemporary Iranian women’s emancipatory discourse, with its significant political and intellectual aspects.

Kamrava promises to analyze the circumstances and dynamics that have facilitated the production of each discourse. After all, disclosing the close connection between discourse and non-discursive practices such as institutions, political events, economic [End Page 327] changes, and processes is a known task of the historian of ideas. Though political practices do not determine the meaning and form of a discourse, they condition the emergence and also the functioning of it. A historian of ideas investigates how the definition of basic concepts and objects takes place; who gets the cognitive/political authority to tell the “truth” about the objects; and how the social and political functions of a discourse unfold.

This promise, nevertheless, remains un-fulfilled. Though Kamrava acknowledges the “nuanced relationship between prevailing political and historical environments and the general types and nature of the discourses” (p. 4) his articulation of this “complex,” mutually constitutive relationship does not transcend undialectical cause-effect (structure-ideology) explanations. Questioning “why did this [the emergence of three “competing” discourses] occur?” (p. 41), the reader is left with a simple — or, simplistic — explication: the post-Khomeini opening in the public sphere facilitated the emergence of these three discourses. However, the question of why each discourse, especially the religious reformist and the secular-modernist, reflects its specific trajectory remains unanswered. There is no concrete analysis of the economic, social, and political factors, the non-discursive practices, which affect each discourse, partially determine its specific course, its content and, in Michel Foucault’s terms, its enunciative modalities.

The absence of such analyses makes learned predictions about the future of each discourse — the task that the last chapter assumes — problematic. Since the book does not offer a theory to frame the interaction between discursive and non-discursive practices, its final predictions of the future ascendency of the secular-modernist (or even the religious reformist) discourse seem speculative. “All things considered,” Kamrava states, “the religious conservative discourse is unlikely to garner significant and sustained public support among the middle classes” (p. 215). We might wonder, why? Is it not the case that the conservative religious discourse has proven to be a master of culture industry, capable of winning the hearts of and mobilizing the masses especially at a time of crisis? Indeed, the conservative religious discourse has given every indication of being utterly pragmatist and anything but “rigid” and “inflexible” (p. 216). Its supreme jurist, based on his absolute guardianship, may alter the most fundamental rules of religion if deemed necessary to the wellbeing of the Islamic state. It seems...

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