MEHDI BAZARGAN: A COMMENTARY

A commentary on pages selected from H. E. Chehabi, IRANIAN POLITICS AND RELILGIOUS MODERNISM (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, n.d.)

Religious modernism is seen by the author as an effort to reestablish harmony between religion and a changing socio-cultural environment. The author interprets this phenomenon as a reactive movement. He is wrong. It is an adjusting movement, to which there is no terminiation. One would better speak of "adaptive permanence" which will continue as long as homo sapiens creates more or less imaginary constructs in an attempt to reduce the complexity of an expanding universe to the dimensions of his small skull.
The author differentiates between modernism, which is secular and Western, and reformism, which is an adaptive tendency within a religious community. In a parallel to intellectual struggles within twentieth century secular Marxism, we may identify "reformism" with "revisionism."
Professor Chehabi asserts that nationalism and "religious modernism" share similar attitudes. That is debatable, but nationalism as a surrogate religion is infinitely malleable, and can coexist equally well with state-sponsored paganism, as with some Nazis in Germany, and state-sponsored secularism, as with Communist Russia, or state-sponsored polytheism, as with the BJP government in Hindu India, or iodolatry of the marketplace, as celebrated in Washington, and first identified by Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) Nationalism, further, is inward-oriented or centripetal within a state structure or linguistic unit, attaining its extreme forms in integral nationalism, as exemplified by Zionism, whereas religion (except for the Hindu caste system) is presumed to supply a universal explanation equally accessible to all adherents regardless of language or race. (To evaluate the Islamic view that the Bahai's are contaminated by Western culture, one may consult statements published by their world headquarters at 100 Linden Street, Wilmette, IL 60091 /www.bahai.us/).
The defensive character of religious modernism is more pronounced in the non-Western world, inhabited by the majority of the planet's population. For technology and ideas about different political systems come to this majority population from outside, as in the case of colonialism, often accompanied by foreign Christian missionaries, or their short-wave radio broadcasts. (as is said to be proverbial in East Asian studies, "First the missionaries, then the merchants, then the Marines.") In later generations the defensive character of the "anti" motivation broadened from individual psychology to a social imperative to resist the invasive sociological entity insofar as it pressed aggressively for a seismic shift in the traditional or dominant social order. Professor Chehabi misses the mark, however, when he glibly speaks of the European acceptance of "modernity" without referring to the French Revolution (1789-99) that gave birth to it, and the Napoleonic Wars that diffused it by military means (1799-1815) until surrounded by commercial-religious nationalism in Anglican England and monarchical-communal nationalism in Orthodox Russia.
SHI'ITE MODERNISM
One characteristic trait of religious modernists is that they are eclectic in their thinking. After the Iranian revolution of 1905-06 (contemporaneous with the first Russian revolution), one faction of the ulema (or community of Islamic scholars) asserted that a secular constitution was incompatible with Islam, whereas a second faction admitted members of the Islamic clergy into the Parliament and thereby asserted that a Parliamentary body was indeed compatible with Islam. Thus the Shi'ite clergy became the most politically active clergy of the early 20th century, according to Dr. Chehabi. They were primarily motivated to establish a "rule of law" in the state rather than to reform or modernise Islam.
To focus on influential Western influences on modern Iranian political thouught, one must advert to the quasi-Fascistic Alexis Carrel (1873-1944), awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1912, and who conducted research at the University of Chicago (funded by John D. Rockefeller) and the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in Newe York City. In 1935 he wrote MAN, THE UNKNOWN (L'homme, cet inconnu) in which he argued that the huyman racd should be governed by a limited intellectual elite, and advocated the useof gas chambers to cull the human herd of inferior stock, e.g., the mentally diseased, the criminal and the defective. Government should be restricted to a hereditary minority composed of the descendents of revolutionary heros, great criminals, or financial magnates. As he wrote, "The conditioning of petty criminals with a whip, or some more scientific procedures, followed by a short stay in hospital, would probably suffice to insure order." ("Alexis Carrel," Wikipedia) Among his aphorisms may be fouond the following: (1) All great men are gifted with intuition. They know without reason or analysis, what they need to know; (2) Everyone makes a greater effort to hurt other people than to help himself; (3) Hard conditions of life are indispensable to bringing out the best in human personality; (4) Life leaps like a geyser for those who drill through the rock of inertia; (5) Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor. After 1939 he enjoyed connections with the government of Marshal Philippe Petain (1856-1951) which chartered his charitable institution, the French Foundation for the Study of Human Problems, in 1941. Among other projects, it developed the first French opinion polls. After Paris was liberated by the Free French army under General Leclerk, Carrel was suspended from his administrative function, and died in November, 1944. Currently he is honored only by Jean-Marie Le Pen of the National Front party.
To explain the appeal of Carrel to Muslim modernizers would try the tolerance of an angel, and certainly exceeds the competence of this writer. In part, Professor Chehabi's view that a disparate variety of sources is requisite to nourish a cultural eclecticism is incontrovertible. On the other hand, his dismissal of Iran as "peripheral" to the market economy of the West manifests an unconscious proclivity to cultural superiority which is incompatable with objective research , sine ira et studio. In Tehran, the social thought of Brussels or New York is equally peripheral to their interests, for there are not many libraries in Europe with volumnous translations from Farsi--not to mention the presence of an unofficial market censorship commonly expressed in the judgment that a volume, musical form or fashion in couture is "not commercial," and where the cultural stagnation of pop music forms of the 1960's and stereotyped Hollywood sit-coms becomes progressively more evident.
Shi'ite modernists in Iran have two guiding principles, according to the author: return to the Koran and a preoccupation with science. In this dual quest they may be contrasted with the revolutionary May 4th movement in late imperial China, which adopted the watchwords "Science and Democracy." While an admiration for empirical science was common to both movements, "democracy" pointed to broad popular participation in political activity, whereas a return to the Koran implied a return to guidance from a narrow council of clerical scholars. In 1883 Ernst Renan (1823-1892) in France attributed Islamic retardation ("backwardness") or persistent traditionalism to features of the Muslim religion, perhaps projecting on the Islamic world elements of his own agonized struggle to reconcile Catholic clericalism with the democracy of the 3rd Republic. The Shi'ite reformer al-Afghani agreed with him.

MEHDI BAZARGAN
Mehdi Bazargan reversed this judgment, observing that in Europe practicing Christians emphasized faith or belief, whereas in Islamic civilization Muslims always emphasized knowledge. In his political thought Bazargan might be clasified as a (waffling) "Islamic liberal." Like others living under the Reza Shah regime, he became influenced by the legends of Persian imperial greatness before the Islamic conquest and gave considerable attention to the controversial question of Iranian national identity. Islamic "underdevelopment," he thought, was initiated prior to European expansion and flowed from Islamists' withdrawal to private affairs to the detriment of state (so-called "public") interests. Muslim scholars thereby became progressively divorced from a practical familiarity with secular or everyday affairs. Notwithstanding this social defect, Bazargan asserted that the Iranian nation (as part of the Aryan race) proved to be uniquely adaptable in its historical development, for the peaceful Aryan base had progressively assimilated successive waves of "progressive and violent" invaders, from the ancient Assyriansto the later Arabs, Mongols and Tatars. (One also encounters the same argument propagated among its Russian neighbors to the north, when the agrarian and democratic Slavic communes and their princes progressively assimilated their foreign conquerers, from the Scandinavians in 862 through the agnostic Mongols, Muslim Tatars and Protestant Germans from the Baltic principalities.) Rural agriculturalists, according to Bazargan, were less inclined to mensuration than uban merchants, and consequently the agrarian Aryan nation, accustomed to domination by Mother Nature, developed a fatalistic outlook and were indifferent to academic accuracy. The result was that classic Persian literature valued exaggeration at the expense of realism (as did the Ukrainian Nikolai Gogol' /1809-1852/), and deployed the same commanding tone against sloth as progressive Russians, including V.I. Lenin (1870-1924), manifested in condemning that privileged scion of aristocracy, Oblomov, lounging in his halat (dressing gown) on his divan, in Goncharov's famous novel of 1859. Indeed, it would appear that Bazargan, born in the Russian-dominated Caucasus in the city of Bazargan in Azerbaijan, and following the same migratory route to Tehran as Ayatollah Khomenei (1900-1989), projected many of the standard formulae of classic Russian literary tradition on the developing Iranian national consciousness.
As a progressive "liberalizing" intellectual, Bazargan supported creating Islamic associations of students, engineers and teachers, and urged Muslim scholars in the ulema to support Iranian nationalists. He asserted that while political considerations should not interfere with religion, Islam should inform all social and political activity in the state. The application of Islamic principles should constitute the legislative agends of parliaments. While Islam should proclaim the general principles by which society should constitute itself, the details of governance are to be worked out by believers according to the immediate situation. (His views in this regard bear comparison with the assertion of a leading Slavophil, Ivan Kireevsky /1806-1856/) that the Russian Orthodox Church should consititute a "community of believing reason.") He repeatedly asserted that there should be no compulsion in religion. Bazargan believed that all believers in the three Abrahamic cults should have equal rights and responsibilites in the Islamic state. Like other modernists he emphasized that Islam was rationalistic (tactfully not mentioning the irrational mystery of a Triune God worshipped in the West). But in criticizing the UN Declaration of Human Rights, Bazargan asserted, with the Prophet, that "the dearest to God were those who were most virtuous," and that, by implication, virtue trumps legality. Unaware of the contradiction, he sides with those early Muslims he formerly criticized for withdrawing from public life to restrict their social activity to virtuous practice in private. He never overcame this contradiction. After resigning as Prime Minister of the new Islamic Republic in 1979 and returning to private life, he wrote that the Republic demanded more of its free citizens than Allah had demanded from the prophets.
But as the Prophet and the Imams were no longer accessible for guidance, Bazargan asserted that the congregation of all believers must participate, in a kind of "community of believing reason," in the choice of their rulers. He also argued that as men are free, they were endowed with the capacity and the right to embrace Islam or to reject it. Freedom of speech should be allowed to opponents in order that the application of reason to problems whould illumine a more enlightened path. In his final book, written in 1983, Bazargan summons the Spanish Inquisition to the minds of Eurasian readers to color his rejection of the methods of his Islamic successors in authority to impose religion. He might have recalled, but did not, that the Thirty Years' War in Europe (1618-1648) was settled at Westphalia through the partisans' acceptance of the formula Cuius regio, eius religio (Religion follows the will of the ruler). In his final years he rejected the market-of-heads political orthodoxy proclaimed in the European political systems: "From an Islamic point of view Western democracy is not government by the people, nor does it benefit the people....It rules over the whole people and deceives them with its false propaganda. The colonial governments that had dragged people through blood and debased them derive from the same democracy." Scholars in comparative political systems might view Bazargan as a kind of proponent of Muslim Iranophilism modelled on Slavophilism. It is incontrovertible that Bazargan's world outlook was comprised in part from incompatible propositions, in that while valuing Islamic virtue over political activity, he recommended broad popular participation in selecting a government while at the same time he rejected the demonstrated course of popular democracy in practice.

--Joe Tudeh