Review of Religious Secularity: A Theological Challenge to the Islamic State (original) (raw)
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Naser Ghobadzadeh , Religious Secularity : A Theological Challenge to the Islamic State
Islam and Civilisational Renewal, 2016
This book is an important-though controversial-addition to the discourse surrounding Islamic political thought. It traces its lineage to the debate advocating a separation of religion and politics. By putting this politico-religious discourse into a new oxymoronic term, 'religious secularity', the author attempts to construct another theological challenge to the concept of an Islamic state. Hailing from Iran, Dr. Naser Ghobadzadeh (currently a Research Fellow at the Institute for Social Justice, the Australian Catholic University), examines Islamic politico-religious discourse in the context of his homeland. Briefly reviewing the political struggles Muslims have faced during the second half of the twentieth century while trying to fulfil their aspirations of establishing an Islamic state, he attempts to describe the parallel Iranian quest for a democratic secular state. Being aware of the varied definitions and understandings of the term 'secularism', he intentionally uses the term 'secularity' to clarify the distinction between the emerging discourse in Iran and the conventional understanding of secularism as a global paradigm. This discourse, according to the author, was first developed following a series of articles written by Abdulkarim Soroush in 1989, in which the latter emphasized a separation of religion from religious knowledge (p.25). The author ignores, however, the Sunni scholar, Shaykh Ali Abdul Raziq, who, in his book entitled al-Islam wa uṣūl al-Ḥukm (1925), held the same view. This might be because of the author's focus on Shi'ite political thought. The author considers 'religious secularity' to be part of a modern-day Iranian religious reform movement which seeks to challenge the legitimacy of the Islamic state and draw attention to the detrimental impact that the unification of religion and state can have on both institutions. By articulating the term 'religious secularity', the author challenges both clerical control in the political sphere and the unification of state and religion entailed by that control. The author maintains that the Iranian clerical state model has been contested by both the Reformist Movement (1997-2005) and the Green Movement (2009 onwards). The first of these (both ultimately ineffectual) movements advocated the incompatibility of Islam with democratic forms of government, while the second argued that "modern political ideas such
Secularization in Iranian society
… and society in Iran: living with …, 2008
This article purports to analyze the levels of secularization in Iran: macro, meso, and micro level. It argues that a systematic secularization is coming to life at the macro level. Further, in the realm of life-world and in the public and private spheres religion continues to have a significant impact. It also cautions that at the meso level, a distinction ought to be made between institutional religion and that of the public sphere. As a matter of fact, belief and religious motivations at the level of individual acts still play a noteworthy role in orientating individuals’ acts. Meanwhile, individuals are inclined to differentiate between religious acts formed freely in the life-world and acts manifested in the formal sphere. In summary, the process of secularization is said to be more serious and remarkable at the macro level, that is to say in order for the living sphere to be religious again, besides refraining from institutionalizing religious elements, it needs to strive to pour them out of the system sphere and reestablish communication.
Religious Secularity: A Theological Challenge to the Islamic State
2014
Naser Ghobadzadeh's Religious Secularity presumes that Muslim thinkers no longer consider an Islamic state as the desired political system. This aversion to a theocratic state is perhaps felt most by those Iranian reformist thinkers who have had to operate in such a state since the 1979 Islamic revolution. The author claims that in its place, the Muslim world has devised a new theoretical category called "religious secularity," which allows for a religiously secular state to, at least theoretically, present itself as an alternative to an Islamic one. He defines this religiously secular attitude as one that refuses to eliminate religion from the political sphere, but simultaneously carves out a space for secular politics by narrowly promoting only the institutional separation of religion and state. He claims that this concept has two goals: to (1) restore the clergy's genuine spiritual aims and reputation and (2) show that Islam is compatible with the secular democratic state. In Iran, rather than launching overt attacks against the theocratic state, this discourse of religious secularity has created a more "gentle, implicit and sectarian manner in challenging the Islamic state." Unlike in pre-revolutionary times when there were both religious and non-religious ideologies vying for an audience, Ghobadzadeh suggests that in Iran today, "the alternative discourses are religious and concentrate on liberating religious discourse from state intervention." The author pays homage to Abdullahi An-Na'im and claims to be using Islam and the Secular State: Negotiating the Future of Shari'a (2008) as a conceptual framework. As far as subfields within political science go, Ghobadzadeh's Religious Secularity is also similar in form to Nader Hashemi's Islam, Secularism, and Liberal Democracy (2009) and, as such, can be considered a work of theoretical comparative political science.
Religious secularity: A vision for revisionist political Islam
Despite its promises, the Islamic state of Iran has systematically prioritized political considerations over religious precepts, inadvertently generating a reformist religious discourse that challenges the very foundations of the Islamic state. This article conceptualizes the religious secularity discourse and the paradoxes ingrained in the Islamic state. The religious secularity discourse rejects the notion that Islamic holy texts offer a blueprint for governance and calls for the secular democratic state to realize the core principle of Islam: justice [Adl]. Towards this end, inclusive secular democratic principles champion a socio-political polity conducive to the cultivation of genuine religiosity, whereby faith and religious practices are free of coercion by fellow citizens or state institutions. By blurring the boundary between the religious and the secular and challenging the religious secular dichotomy, religious secularity highlights the relevance and possibility of harmonizing Islamic and inclusive secular democratic principles.
This article examines the secularization thesis of Iran's faqih-headed revolutionary Islamic state, as put forward by Sa'id Hajjarian (1954–), against the institutional and political developments in the post-Khomeini period. His thesis posited that the religious state in postrevolutionary Iran, with its official doctrine of the absolute mandate of the jurisprudent, serves as the most important accelerator in the two-part process of secularization of the traditional institutions and jurisprudence of Shiism as well as of the faqih-headed Islamic state. The article finds that the developments in the post-Khomeini period have generally confirmed the logic and insights of Hajjarian's thesis and suggests that the secularizing trends will likely continue as long as this particular state is in place.
Modernity, secularism, and the political in Iran
2016
Bibliography dissertation. Thank you so much for everything. And finally, to Rachel-thank you so much for you love and care over many, many years. You have always supported me even when this process has not been easy on you, especially given the long hours and time apart. You are the stabilizing and grounding force that has made every thing possible. I am so incredibly fortunate and lucky to have you in my life, I am looking forward to being your partner in crime in whatever adventures await us.
RELIGIOUS REFORMATION DISCOURSE: IRAN'S PATH TO INDIGENOUS SECULARISM
The religious resurgence that occurred in the last decades of the twentieth century questioned the validity of the global secularisation thesis inspired by the thought of key sociologists such as Herbert Spencer, Karl Marx, Max Weber and Emile Durkheim, all of whom generally adhered to the gradual disengagement of religion from the socio-political sphere. Although not the sole element, the emergence of political Islam took a leading role in presenting this challenge.