Arshin Adib-Moghaddam

The pluralistic momentum in Iran and the future of the reform movement

Abstract This article explores the pluralistic momentum in Iran. It challenges the state-centric approach to Iranian politics, arguing that contemporary Iranian reformism manifests itself as a trajectory, yet original and indigenous, political culture that feeds into the political process in a bottom-up manner—from society to the state—not the other way around. Assessing the theoretical, methodological and empirical implications of this hypothesis, the article outlines the contours of Irans reform movement and its interaction with the countrys diverse civil society. As long as Iranian politics is driven by the pluralistic momentum, it is claimed, Iranian reformism will elicit political results and—to highly dissimilar degrees—will continue to provoke the silent subservience of central institutions of the state.

Islamic Utopian Romanticism and the Foreign Policy Culture of Iran

The disappearance of utopia brings about a static state of affairs in which man himself becomes no more than a thing. . . . Thus, after a long tortuous, but heroic development, just at the highest stage of awareness, when history is ceasing to be blind fate, and is becoming more and more man’s own creation, with the relinquishment of utopias, man would lose his will to shape history and therewith his ability to understand it.

A (short) history of the clash of civilizations

Where does the clash of civilizations thesis and its underlying us-versus-them mentality come from? How has the idea been engineered historically and ideologically in the ‘east’ and ‘west’? What were the functions of Christianity and Islam to these ends? These are some of the questions that will be discussed in this article that engages both the clash of civilizations thesis and the discourse of ‘Orientalism’ more generally. Dissecting the many manifestations of mutual retributions, the article establishes the nuances of the ‘clash’ mentality within the constructs we commonly refer to as ‘Islam’ and the ‘west’, showing how it is based on a questionable ontology, how it has served particular political interests and how it is not inevitable. What is presented, rather, is a short genealogy of this idea, dispelling some of its underlying myths and inventions along the way.

Inventions of the Iran - Iraq War

For many years historians of west Asian affairs have preferred to refer to a descriptive reading of international events in the region as if they were trying to define law-like causalities, unchangeable continua or inevitable facts to the multifarious transformations and diversity intrinsic to the ‘Middle East.’ The methods that empower these historians to pursue this mode of analysis are partly engrained in the discipline and partly borrowed from other social sciences with a strong positivistic and empiricist tradition, especially economics, political science, and, albeit to a lesser extent (and perhaps unconsciously), ‘realist’ international relations theories. What has been written about the Iran–Iraq war of 1980–88 is no exception. A quick perusal of the literature reveals three recurrent themes: first, Saddam Hussein seized the favorable international moment that was conducive to a military attack against the newly established Islamic state in Iran (realist, power politics argument); second, the Iran–Iraq war was inevitable due to the ‘historic’ enmity between the two states (‘orientalist’ argument); and third, the Ba’thist state felt threatened by the spillover of the Islamic revolution and decided to pre-empt further Shia uprisings in Najaf, Karbala, Samarra, Kazimiyah, and Baghdad as a means to contain a Shia resurgence in the greater west Asian area (balance of power argument).

What is Radicalism? Power and Resistance in Iran

What does it mean to be radical? In European political theory, radicalism has long been associated with leftist ideas and socialist theories. ‘To be a “radical”,’ Anthony Giddens writes, ‘was to have a certain view of the possibilities inherent in history—radicalism meant breaking away from the hold of the past.’ Some radicals were immersed in the idea of revolution and many were fascinated by the possibility to bring about an entirely ‘new’ historical sequence. ‘History was there to be seized hold of, to be moulded to human purposes,’ Giddens argues, ‘such that the advantages which in previous eras seemed given by God, and the prerogative of the few, could be developed and organised for the benefit of all.’ This definition of radical politics as a revolt against the status quo is also emphasized by Fred Halliday. He focused on revolutions more specifically when he conceptualized them as ‘a break with the constraints of the past, the traditional or established society.’ Revolutions made it possible to imagine ‘a new society, even a new world, to be constructed. This emphasis upon breaking with the past, the creation of something new,’ he continues, ‘was to become a prominent strain in the appeals and self-justification of revolutions.’ Both Giddens and Halliday point to an important object of radical politics: the negation of the prevalent order. When Lenin said that without theory there will be no revolutionary action, Ernesto Guevara stressed the indispensable need to explain the motives, ends and methods of the revolution in Cuba, and Marx imagined the final moment of the class struggle when everything would be decided in a momentous battle for the end of history, they alluded

Islamutopia, (Post)Modernity and the Multitude

Among the many powerful arguments proposed by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt in Empire and Multitude is the idea that contemporary political movements in the Islamic worlds can be considered ‘postmodern’ in their ambition and constitution. ‘In the context of Islamic traditions’, the authors write, ‘fundamentalism is postmodern insofar as it rejects the tradition of Islamic modernism for which modernity was always overcoded as assimilation or submission to Euro-American hegemony’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000, p. 149). It must follow quite logically that contemporary Islamic movements are not ‘fundamentalist’, that they are not archaic and retroactive. Rather to the contrary, Hardt and Negri agree with Fazlur Rahman, Akbar Ahmed, Bobby Sayyid and others that contemporary Islamic movements are progressive, not at least because they emphasise ijtihad, or original thought. From this perspective, Hardt and Negri (2000, p. 149) conclude that the Islamic revolution in Iran may be considered the ‘first postmodernist revolution’.

Manufacturing war: Iran in the neo-conservative imagination

Abstract This article investigates how Iran is represented by neo-conservative activists and analysts primarily in the USA. It starts with the epistemological contention that every political activity occurs within a context, which is constituted by invented narratives, institutions, norms and other ideational factors. In a second step empirical evidence is marshalled that shows the mechanisms of contemporary US neo-conservatism, its impact on the decision-making process in Washington and the consequences for Iranian – American relations.

Islamic Secularism and the Question of Freedom in Iran

My research deals with the question of ‘freedom’ in Iran and the appropriation of ‘liberal’ ideas by influential intellectuals with an Islamic persuasion. At the same time, I am conceptualising the term ‘Islamic secularism’ with a particular emphasis on the spectre of democracy in Iran. I argue that Iranian thinkers, whose philosophical nodal point continues to be a modernistic interpretation of Islam (or Islamism), have struggled to formulate a theory that would transcend the confines of the revolution and satisfy the demands for pluralism and liberty put forward during several protests in Iran and, of course, during the 2011 Arab revolts.

India in the Iranian imagination: Between Culture and Strategic Interest

In the course of building a modern nation-state, a project that was given impetus by the Safavid dynasty in the sixteenth century, the political classes governing Iran have developed a civilisational discourse and a historical imagination that casts tall shadows on the international affairs of the country. India has a prominent place in this self-perception. The confines of this chapter do not allow me to present an exhaustive history of the ways in which India has figured in the Iranian worldview. Nonetheless, it is possible to sketch some central nodal points holding the Indo-Iranian narrative together in order to gauge, in a second step, the contemporary position of India in Iran’s ‘national’ imagination. To that end, this chapter begins by drawing the contours of what I call an ‘Indo-Iranian dialectic’ through a survey of cultural exchanges since the sixteenth century and their impact on religion, architecture, literature and politics. This Indo-Iranian dialectic can be conceptualised as a historical imaginary that impinges on the mutual perception of both countries and which has made it that much more difficult to confine or limit their relations, one of the central aims of successive US administrations and the state of Israel, especially in recent years. In a concomitant step, it will be shown that Indo-Iranian relations are also shaped by material interests through an analysis of the economic ties between the two countries which Tehran and Delhi deem pivotal.

Global grandeur and the meaning of Iran: From the Shah to the Islamic Republic

Foreign policy is never really restricted to material factors, which are conventionally defined in terms of the ability to project power through military or economic means.1 In addition, foreign policy is about imagining the place of a country among the community of nations. The international affairs of a country are about claiming a status, questions of dignity, identity, reputation, emotions, and words. In the Iranian case, certainly from the early twentieth century onward when the contours of the modern Iranian nation-state were drawn, foreign policy has always also been about imagining global grandeur. Contemporary Iranian leaders, more professionally since the reign of Reza Shah (1921–1941), have not tended to limit the international relations of the country to issues of survival and a narrow understanding of the “national interest.” Even in the absence of material resources justifying their self-perception, Iranian leaders have claimed and aspired to regional, even global power. There is then Iranian leaders’ Iran-centric perception of the world that has repeatedly lent itself to political hubris. This is exemplified by imperial titles such as pivot of the universe, king of kings, light of the Aryans, for the country’s royal dynasties and leader of the umma, shadow of god, and so on, after the Islamic revolution of 1979. Indeed, the only contemporary leader of Iran who did not claim an otherworldly title was Mohammad Mossadegh, Iran’s first democratically elected prime minister who was deposed by the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) led coup d’etat in 1953.