Iran’s intellectual revolution

Mehran Kamrava0521897998, 9780521897990, 9780511438707, 9780521725187, 0521725186

Since its revolution in 1979, Iran has been viewed as the bastion of radical Islam and a sponsor of terrorism. The focus on its volatile internal politics and its foreign relations has, according to Kamrava, distracted attention from more subtle transformations which have been taking place there in the intervening years. With the death of Ayatollah Khomeini a more relaxed political environment opened up in Iran, which encouraged intellectual and political debate between learned elites and religious reformers. What emerged from these interactions were three competing ideologies which Kamrava categorises as conservative, reformist and secular. As the book aptly demonstrates, these developments, which amount to an intellectual revolution, will have profound and far-reaching consequences for the future of the Islamic republic, its people and very probably for countries beyond its borders. This thought-provoking account of the Iranian intellectual and cultural scene will confound stereotypical views of Iran and its mullahs.

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Table of contents :
Cover……Page 1
Half-title……Page 3
Series-title……Page 4
Title……Page 5
Copyright……Page 6
Dedication……Page 7
Contents……Page 9
Tables……Page 10
Acknowledgments……Page 11
1 Introduction……Page 15
2 Emerging Iranian discourses……Page 24
History and discourse……Page 26
Three discourses……Page 54
3 Theorizing about the world……Page 58
The Fourth Generation……Page 59
The Iranian intellectual……Page 83
Conclusion……Page 92
4 The conservative religious discourse……Page 93
Contextualizing the Right……Page 95
A question of ijtihad……Page 102
The just order……Page 108
The modern world……Page 130
5 The reformist religious discourse……Page 134
The religious intellectual phenomenon……Page 136
Articulating an Islamic democracy……Page 146
A question of hermeneutics……Page 158
Reforming religion……Page 164
Conclusion……Page 185
6 The secular-modernist discourse……Page 187
Grasping modernity……Page 192
Modernity’s pillars……Page 205
Constructing a discourse……Page 225
Assessing the discourses……Page 228
The road ahead……Page 236
Bibliography……Page 241
Index……Page 276