Iran: Secularism and social emancipation

The Present Historic Moment

Long before the mass discontent appeared as a popular political uprising in recent months, the Iranian ruling powers sensed the awakening of the repressed yet un-conforming population as the foreboding of an approaching storm. They were more perceptive than the opposition leaders who had turned inward after the failed attempts of the 1990s that focused on the state as the locus of social change. The "silent revolution" simmering in the depths of the collective consciousness, was fast reaching the surface and turning outward.

Ahmadinejad's regime clearly understood itself as the counter to the coming revolution. But despite all repressive measures during his first four-year term, it became clear that his task remained largely unfinished. Hence the need to "will," from above, his "re-election" in 2009. Even within the traditional conservative camp, constant social unrest led to fragmentation and strife.

The re-emergence of the multi-dimensional popular uprising, before and after the elections of June 12, proves that the so-called "quiescent" decade was really a time of political maturation, re-thinking and recollection. This intellectual fermentation was reflected in translations of works of Hegel, Marx, Lukacs, Luxemburg, Marcuse and Dunayevskaya, to name a few, as well as conferences celebrating the 200th anniversary of Hegel's Phenomenology, and the unprecedented popular reception of lectures by such scholars as Antonio Negri and Jürgen Habermas.

This "epoch-making renaissance in political and cultural discourse"[1] caused such discomfort in official circles that the director of the Iranian Institute of Philosophy exclaimed, "Of the 15 doctoral candidates at the institute, 11 are working on Western philosophy. Only 4 of them are writing Ph.D.'s on Islamic philosophy."

A 23-member peacemaking delegation, coordinated by the Fellowship of Reconciliation, observed after visiting Iran in 2007, "Iran's love of philosophy can be found outside the corridors of academia as well." Everywhere they went, they saw "a deep passion for ideas, a palpable craving for intellectual dialogue…" (see forusa.org).

This thirst for ideas is now combined with a new political maturity. Under the impact of the ongoing struggles, reform leaders have turned to the ideals of the 1979 Revolution by highlighting its unfulfilled promises. The Green Movement is neither monolithic nor the full expression of the still developing social consciousness. As one student activist observed, the reform leaders "do not create breakthroughs. After all, they too are part of the 30-year power structure in Iran….What is important is the impact that Mousavi's presence at that position will have on the public sphere, and the activism that it will promote and advance." He concludes by saying that his support for a reform leader in an election "does not blur my identity with those reformers in the power structure" (see roozonline.com).

Many publications have been created. Innumerable organizations have been formed. Thousands of weblogs and on-line journals have appeared. Public debate and dialogue are everywhere--in the Metro, in a taxi, at the workplace or in informal gatherings at home. There is no end to the energy and creativity of the people. As one worker stated, the workplace is where "everybody does nothing except find ways to get around blocked web sites and read the day's news" (see globalpost.com).

This self-activity has generated a leap in self-consciousness--a whole new sense of what is possible. Had anyone, reformist or revolutionary, anticipated this new objective reality? Is there something inherently deficient in emancipatory theory that perpetually condemns it to arrive on the scene only after the fact? Can theory and practice ever be united?

Today's movement has not reached the scope of 1979 at its high point. But that's hardly an excuse to avoid a self-critique. It is high time to re-conceptualize theory as wholly immanent within the movement from practice, making the movement relate itself to itself, and become fully aware of its own potential, goals and aspirations. Once the masses gain self-knowledge and the corresponding judgment, the entire old system will no longer be tenable.

Islamic Republic's Conflicted Self-Understanding

For 30 years the theocratic state in Iran claimed legitimacy as the embodiment of the universal interests of society. The popular uprising demanding regeneration of society on a new basis has removed this justification.

The Islamic State's presupposition was the 1979 Revolution. In its self-confident 1980s it devoured its own children, turning against the very forces that helped bring it to power. A ruthless counter-revolutionary terror even drove its first ever elected President, Bani Sadr, into exile.

The eight-year war with Iraq fed religious nationalism and perfected the terror. The despotic state became an end in itself subordinating civil life. The "citizen" was a fiction, an abstract appendage to and mere servant of the state. For three decades the absolutist regime politicized the citizenry by reinventing enemies. The vengeful regime's eternal warfare against "infidels" tolerated no dissent. Every expression of opposition, however mild, was immediately branded as Moharebe Khoda, "the Enemy of God," to justify its eradication.

Religion became a means to a thoroughly secular aim. It was nothing but the religion of expediency, an empirical religion, fused with politics and nuclear science. This theocratic edification of political power brought the state religion into a direct clash with the consciousness of the people for whom religion was "the sigh of the oppressed and the soul of a soulless world."[2]

Having resorted to violence, torture and even rape in face of an unarmed but deep and widespread grassroots movement, the state has lost the battle for the minds of the people. With its "spiritualism" fully exposed for what it is, a crass materialism, it has no other strategy but the savage unleashing of brute force to guarantee its secular survival. When the so-called heavenly realm comes crashing down, and discloses itself as but the sheer instrument of secular domination, the people can no longer take refuge in a celestial "beyond" and escape from the here and now. The political and the religious alienations intermerge. The critique of "heaven" becomes a social critique of the contradictory reality on earth.

Political fissures in established ruling circles are reflected in theological divides. The contradiction within religious thought has assumed the shape of the "theology of doubt" among a formidable section of the clerics. Political religion, a religion that thinks politically, has come to a certain self-understanding that it is the religion of domination. Some within the religious camp no longer want to continue with self-deception, and now take refuge in what they call "the pure Mohammedan Islam" (Islam-eh nab-eh Mohammadi). Prominent theologians, among them the renowned Abdulkarim Soroush (see drsoroush.com), want to free civil society from state religion and advocate freedom of religion. They resemble modern day Islamic Lutherans who want to overcome the "faith in the authority by restoring the authority of faith."

Religious consciousness has reached a moment of internal combustion. The clerical establishment, headed by the Supreme Leader, seeks to relieve this internal torment by safeguarding their power at all cost. No more playing with the idea of "religious democracy." After the fiasco of the latest election, their claim to "legitimacy" has become merely a direct link with "God"!

The "idealism" of this hypocritical state is manifest in a most materialistic way--the display of the force of arms. Those who pretended to be at war with the materialism of the modern world sustain their power only with the most sophisticated modern technologies. The "Islamic Republic," stripped of its ideological religious shell, has evolved into a security-military-police state.

Where does the new social critique start? Should the spectrum of forces that identify themselves with "secularism" start by a critique of religious consciousness in general or religion as such? Is the achievement of a secular society an end in itself?

Reaching for the Future: A Perspective

The despotic regime in Iran that denies its citizens freedom of conscience, freedom to think and even to worship, is far worse than a 21st century version of the inquisitors of the Middle Ages. It is more technologically advanced in its arsenal of torture, and in its use of modern media to deliver its message when it puts hundreds of political prisoners in front of the screens to abjure and recant. The Shah, too, shortly before his downfall, dared to put poets, writers and journalists on public trial!

The new regime combined politics with an ideology that administers every aspect of people's lives, public or private, while replacing the Monarch with the office of an unelected Absolute Leader whose command is Law. Under such tyranny, the desire for political emancipation from state religion has gained a near universal appeal. The call for a secular society is certainly legitimate and a great step forward.

Yet in the wake of this great ongoing upheaval, it is imperative not to limit our vision of the future; not only because despotism can also take a secular form, but also because we have witnessed how an epochal revolution 30 years ago got aborted when all the concrete demands for a new way of life after the overthrow of the Shah were completely submerged under what was also a legitimate demand: "anti-imperialism." Can we meet the challenge of our time with a fuller, concrete response?

"Secularism" was born of a widespread revolution in manifold forms of science and culture, culminating in the great French Revolution. This revolution ushered in the modern age, driving religion out of political power and into the private realm. It was a great leap forward to dethrone religion by bringing in "the goods and furnishings of the Here and Now" (Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, p. 512). Yet over 200 years later, there is not just the rise of political Islam in the "East" but also the invasion of the "public sphere" by Christian fundamentalism in the "West."

Secularism's worldliness did not confront human self-alienation in its material form. The antithesis of faith and knowledge fails to touch on the human content of either religion or secular knowledge. Soroush appeals to the "right of reason," based on the enlightened "I," against dogmatic faith. He attacks the idea of revolution as incompatible with reason because revolutionaries, defined by what they are against, are a "long way from knowing what they favor" (see eurozine.com). However, it is not the enlightened "I" but rather the historic reason of Iranian masses who brought this momentous historic turning point, including the challenge to dogmatic faith.

Therefore, the positive within the negative, what Hegel called the negation of the negation, must be found within the revolution. The critique of religion as such will, yet again, leave the movement unprepared for what happens after the existing theocratic regime is overthrown. Are we now condemned to undergo the vicissitudes of a secular capitalistic development, a development which today has put a question mark over human survival on this planet? The positive human content of both secular life and religion is a social endeavor. It can only be realized through social emancipation beyond the political form of the state.

Soroush's goal of restoring the religious human as a moral, pious being apart from the worldly realm separates religion (faith) from history and the historical religious consciousness. He does resemble Luther, who, after all, betrayed those who wanted to realize the human content of religion. Luther's challenge to the religious hierarchy unleashed a revolutionary peasant movement led by religious leaders like Thomas Munzer. They fought the aristocracy and the Church, which was a huge continent-wide money-making enterprise built on the backs of the peasants. Munzer and his followers thought they were following Luther's teaching about realizing principles in real life without the mediating hierarchy of the Church. But Luther betrayed them by siding with the German princes in a great slaughter.

Secularism challenges religion without confronting its material basis in human self-alienation. Workers, who have no commodity to sell but their own labor power, are alienated from their own labor and are related to each other through things. Freedom under a secular state, says Marx, is only defined negatively. The other person is "not the realization of...freedom, but the barrier to it" (Marx, "On the Jewish Question," Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 3, p. 163). The positive expression of freedom is not in the isolated individual, the ego, but, in the case of labor, the human content of cooperative labor realized by freely associated labor.

In Iran today, many tendencies are inside an ideological bubble detached from material life, the production and reproduction of life through human labor. Yet where are the workers' rights in the demands for civil liberties? Are workers a "sphere in civil society that is not of civil society" as Marx put it? Workers are vocal in demanding the right to organize, the right to strike, but the reform leaders cannot hear them. Workers have gone on strike for unpaid wages, in some cases unpaid for six months to a year. They are bludgeoned and imprisoned when they take to the streets and ask for it.

The explicit inclusion of labor could add a new universal dimension to the spontaneous forms of social solidarity in today's liberatory struggles. At its high point, the emancipatory movement is not yet alienated from its social content in the form of an abstract whole, either as a monolithic political Party or a State power. Now is the time to work out how to avoid yet another unfinished revolution and finally achieve what Marx called "human emancipation" when "the actual, individual man has taken back into himself the abstract citizen…when he has recognized and organized his own powers as social powers so that social force is no longer separated from him as political power" (MECW, 3:168).

NOTES:

1. Danny Postel, "Iran and the Future of Liberalism," see www.theliberal.

2. Karl Marx's Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 131.

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