The Changing Concept of the “intellectual” in Iran

Ramin Jahanbegloo

Intellectuals talking and writing about intellectuals could be a very perilous enterprise, because it can become not only parochial, but also. Thus, the question to be asked is this: how can one continue to be part of the intellectual world, with all its risks and dangers, and yet keep a critical distance from it? This question becomes even more relevant and pertinent when it is related to the general definition and to the fate of the intellectual in the first decade of 21st century. However, everyone knows that there is no one definition of the intellectual. Since Socrates, intellectuals have portrayed themselves as the consciousness of society and as the guardians of truth and justice for all. This figure occurs in the Enlightenment’s image of « the ill-natured men » who redeem our race as lawgivers and scholars and can be further traced right up to Gramsci's own variation on the theme of the 'organic intellectual' - and beyond. The term 'intellectual' did not emerge until the Dreyfus Affair in France in the late 1890s, however, the figure of  the intellectual as the bearer of universal values and the representative of truth and justice for all was by then already firmly established. But many argue that with the changes which occurred in both history and society in late 20th century, the public role of the intellectual is no longer desirable, or even possible. This claim seems to me to be based on a false premise: the idea that for certain thinkers today in Iran, the role of the intellectual is no longer possible; that the intellectual has been pronounced dead, abandoned and done away with. This myth is perpetuated not only by those who see the apparent demise of the intellectual as a good thing, but also by those who regard the death of the intellectual as a  way to  get to  a new ideological  promise of action. I do not want to simply reverse the myth of the intellectual's decline. What concerns me is the concept of the intellectual itself, especially in the Iranian context, because I think that over the last 100 years or so certain Iranian thinkers have initiated a discussion around the question of the intellectual without actually abandoning or eliminated anything. At this point it becomes clear that the task of producing an account of history of Iranian intellectual is rendered problematic not just by differences, but by a great many continuities between traditionalism and modernism , Marxism and post- Marxism, revolution and post-revolution, to name but a few. One effect of this is to place a question mark against the myth of Iranian Revolution: the idea that it was at this point that the idea of the intellectual came to an end and was finally abandoned in Iran; and that post-islamist - along with post – leftist intellectualism can be confined to a particular period, place or position that can be regarded as coming afterwards. However, the idea of the intellectual, it can be seen, was already rendered problematic in discourses long before the Iranian Revolution of 1979. This is not to deny that something has changed; that there has been a new history, not to say a new ontology of both the intellectual and of the interrogation of the intellectual in Iran. From the early monavar al- fekran characterized by personalities like Mirza fath Ali Akhudzadeh, Mirza Abd al-Rahim Talebof and Mirza Malkam Khan inspired by the French Enlightenment and the Russian intelligentsia to the radical and leftist minded rawshanfekran of the Tudeh Party and later on Al-Ahmad and Shariati, ending with rawshanfekran-e dini (religious intellectuals) like Abdolkarim Soroush, Mojatahed Shabestari,Mohsen Kadivar and Yousefi Eshkevari, the odyssey of intellectuals in Iran has been tormented by many challenges,  pressures, uncertainties and self-doubts.  Iranian intellectuals entered the modern era in a very odd and paradoxical way. For more than four generations Iranian intellectuals shared an epistemological confidence in Western rationality accompanied with a general political mistrust toward Western societies.  As such, the very unity of the West was not considered as a given. What is most surprising is that while admitting the need for  Iranian tradition as the non-West and as a mirror by which the West becomes visible, Iranian intellectuals obviously did not ask if the mirror may be obscure or not. Whether or not the image facilitated by Iranian traditions was the true representation of what was actually there was not at issue. What is worth noting is that generations of Iranian intellectuals dealt with the Iranian culture and tradition as opposed to the Western traditions as though they were clearly shaped and as though they could be treated exhaustively as objects.  All attempts to arrest the strangeness of the other but also the fascination or rejection the West within concepts such as Taqizadeh’s “surrender to the West” or Al-Ahmad’s “Westoxication” were inevitably undercut by the irreducible affinity for Iranian nationalism and Iranian religious traditions. For over 100 years Iranian intellectuals embraced and appropriated Western political and cultural values while at the same time keeping a critical distance from it. Actually in both achieving a discourse on the West and creating a distance from it, they contributed to the creation of a dual sense of magnanimity toward the West coupled with a wounded sense of national pride and a ressentiment of the cultural and political intrusion of the West in Iran. The initial romantic “fascination with the West” which took shape among the Iranian intellectuals in late 19th century was replaced after the Second World War with a broader romantic “revolt against the West”. Surprisingly, the universal sameness of Iranian traditions in opposition to the universal otherness of modernity became a common denominator in both right-wing romantic nationalism as in Marxist anti-imperialist nationalism in Iran.  In both cases this romance of the authentic cultural and national body was characterized by feelings of cultural relativism and traditional anxiety. Different attempts to generate a sense of national pride triggered by a growing awareness of Iran’s backwardness vis-a vis the West were translated through serious calls for Europeanization, internationalism and pan-Islamism. One must not forget that the sense of nationhood, particularly in contrast with the Western form of temporality was a useful mechanism of voicing opposition in Iran against different political status quos while being a strong argument for a discourse of “authenticity”. As a matter of fact, because of the double structure of romancing but at the same time rejecting the West, a constant oscillation was generated between universalism and particularistic  among Iranian intellectuals. Particularism and universalism did not form an antimony but rather mutually reinforced each other. The building of an imaginary glorious past under the old Persian kings or the narrating of an utopian  Iranian secular or religious society were different modes of  particularistic thinking among Iranian intellectuals which thought of themselves as universalistic without coming across the otherness of the other.  One must not forget that all along the 20th century , many Iranian intellectuals joined  Arab, Asian and African intellectuals around the world in extolling the virtues of Iranian traditions as a tool for purifying the non-West from the contamination of Western domination. Such romantic ressentiment was often portrayed as a gesture of emancipation and liberation. For the Iranian intellectualism the « return to roots » and the affirmation of the Perso-Islamic heritage  as much as the acquisition of Western knowledge was considered as the protection of one’s civilization against oustside civilization. In their struggle to overcome modernity the romantic efforts of Iranian intellectuals remained imprisoned in a closed world of cultural solipsism. The metaphor of « a frog in the well » could be helpful  here, because the frog can never see his own well on the walls. For the frog, the totality of his well can never be visible. Therefore, it would never know that it is confined to a tiny space ; it is not aware that what it believes to be the entire universe is merely a small well. In order to know that its universe is merely a well, the image of the well must be projected on the walls. Thus for the frog  the totality of the well  is basically invisible and has to be recognized only as a representation projected on the wells. In a sense, the story of Iranian intellectuals has always been haunted by a sense of insecurity. In other words,  preserving Iranian  cultural and religious traditions did not necessarily mean to isoalte oneself from a combination of third-worldism and the movement of counterculture predominant n the West. On the contrary, Iranian intellectuals became endowed with and aware of their own « self » only when  they had the feeling that they were recognized by the West. A large number of Iranian intellectuals underlined Iran’s particularity on the assumption of Western universalism. It is no accident that the general discourse  among Iranian intellectuals on Iranian uniqueness  mentions innumerable cases of Iran’s difference from the West, thereby defining Iran’s identity in terms of deviations from the West. Its insistence on Iran’s peculiarity and difference from the West embodies a nagging urge to see the self from the viewpoint of the other. But this is nothing but the positing of Iran’s identity in Western terms which in return establishes the centrality of the West as the universal point of reference. In contrast to Turkish cosmpolitanism, meaning the ability of the Turkish  intellectuals in 20th century to readily embrace universally applicable attributes of so-called Western civilizational values, Iranian intellectual cosnsciousness combined Iran’s Persocentric and pre-islamic sense of belonging with Islam as joint foundations of Iranian identity and culture. Yet the existence of these varying perspectives, emerging out of the same national context in Iran , due to encounters with the modern world, point to the very absence of particualr instances of « multiple rooted cosmpolitanism » and dialogical encounters with the West among the Iranian intellectuals before the revolution of 1979. What pre-revolutionary intellectuals in Iran did not understand clearly was that the absence of dialogue with the West did not represent an extension but the destruction of democracy. The irony , alas, was that by removing universal standards and declaring that « anything goes », Iranians did not get more democracy, but what they got were debased imitations of democracy. As such, when hatred of democray becomes itself part of a struggle for democracy, the life of the mind loses all meaning.

The pre-revolution Iran was characterized by two distinct socio-cultural type of intellectuals. On the one hand, those who were deeply by leftist reading of modernity and by the communist experience in Iran and were cut from the religious world, and on the other hand, those who believed in Islamic revivalism, but did not feel a philosophical urge to enter a dialogue with modernity. For both of these  two intellectual categories, the true challenge was to face the paradox of remaining faithful to the critical responsibility of intellectualism while admitting, approving or facing the process of institutionalization of revolutionary Islam as a compelling discourse of power in Iran.In other words, the biggest challenge for many of the liberal and leftist intellectuals was to be able to fulfill their intellectual duty in an anti-intellectual atmosphere characterized by Al-Ahmad holisic discourse on « Westoxication » and the « betrayal of intellectuals ». Therefore, in the first decade of the Iranian revolution, Iranian intellectuals appeared to be among the weakest elements in the Iranian public sphere. The less radical and more liberal minded intellectuals were among the first to be expelled from the Iranian political and intellectual scenes.

One can distinguish in 1979 two main groups of intellectuals in the revolutionary Iran: one the one side, there were those who supported the Iranian revolution, and on the other side, there were those who were victims of it. The less radical and less political intellectuals who had adopted a much more democratic and tolerant discourse in the early 1980s because of their liberal views (people such as Mostafa Rahimi and Shahrokh Meskoob) or were listed as the followers and courtesans of the Shah’s regime (such as Daryush Shayegan and Jamchid Behnam) were among the first to be expelled from the political, social and cultural spheres. Most of them had to face either a cultural persecution or to leave Iran for exile in the European capitals such as Paris, London etc. Practically all these non-revolutionary intellectuals had to face a public sphere dominated by an anti-intellectual and ideological discourses and controlled by Islamic and Marxist-Leninist slogans. They also had to face the emergence in the early 1990s in Iran of those who came to be known as the “religious intellectuals” as their cultural and political rivals. More than 15 years after the creation of the Islamic Republic, the religious intellectuals became the architects of the reform movement in the Iranian presidential elections of 1997.

The key question for a historian of contemporary Iran is: why did most of the Iranian intellectuals align themselves with the forces of the Revolution while others remained silent? The answer resides certainly in the absence of “ethical responsibility” among those that we can name as the “revolutionary intellectuals” in Iran. These intellectuals supported the revolution for two reasons. Firstly, because of the seduction of the concept of “revolution” and what surrounded it. This was accompanied by a sense of “ utopian idealism” and deep attitude of “political romanticism” which was very common in the1960s and 1970s among the Leftist intellectuals in Iran. However, the revolutionary quest of the leftist intellectuals in Iran was characterized by a series of political strategic and philosophical shortcomings. In other words, their ideological preoccupations with the cultural and political dimensions of the Iranian reality was accompanied by a lack of coherent and systematic analysis of the Iranian history and of the Western philosophical heritage. Many of these ideological attitudes are reflected in the leftist intellectual literature of the late 1970s and early 1980s. These works written mainly to convey a revolutionary message based on a process of utopian thinking rather than to serve the cause of critical thinking as the paradigmatic element of intellectual modernity. Secondly, many among the pro- revolutionary intellectuals strived to defend new strategic positions in the new revolutionary society of Iran. For some of them intellectual purges at the level of universities and government offices made room for new faces and new ways of thinking. Unfortunately, as time went by only those who were close to the regime and presented no danger for it could find a solid place inside the institutions controlled by the government. Thousands of Leftist scholars and students were expelled from universities during Iran's Cultural Revolution in the early 1980s. As a result of this, the same revolutionary intellectuals who supported the Iranian Revolution of 1979 in the name of anti-Westernization, anti-imperialism and struggle against Iranian capitalists were considered as the enemies of Islam and dangerous elements for the future of the Islamic regime in Iran. Many of these Leftists intellectuals had to flee for their lives abandoning behind them the Revolution and the hope to see one day a socialist Iran. Others who stayed in Iran had to go through imprisonment and death and found themselves, not only disenchanted and disillusioned by the political defeat of the Left in Iran but also betrayed by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.  However, those among the Islamic revolutionary intellectuals who remained faithful to the Islamic regime adopted an instrumentalist view of Islam as a mobilizing political ideology and tried to bridge the gap created by the modern institutions during the Pahlavi regime between intellectuals and clergy. This philosophical-political attitude, which could be called as the “Al-Ahmad syndrome”, could be considered as the first anti-intellectual discourse elaborated by a modern intellectual in Iran.

As such, the revolutionary discourse of Westoxication and anti-intellectualism became the dominat paradigm of Iran’s cultural revolution. Being kept aside from any kind of participation in the Iranian public sphere, secular intellectuals had to face their fragile situation until the death of Ayatollah Khomeini and the end of the war with Irak. However, post-revolutionary Iran was characterized by the public appearance of « religious intellectuals » who were up to a certain drgree followers and even ideologues of the Islamic revolution. The major difference between the so-called « religious intellectuals » or « post-Islamist intellectuals » and their predecessors like Shariati, Bazargan and Motahari, was their interrelatedness with the idea of  civil society.  By refusing to legitimize the necessary identity of religion and politics, intellectuals like Abdolkarim Soroush, Mojtahed Shabestari, Yousefi Eshkevari and Mohsen Kadivar formulated the ambiguous notion of « religious civil society » and underlined their opposition to the absolute supremacy of the Faqih. The rise of religious intellectuals can be followed through the writings of Soroush and Shabestari. Soroush’s main idea is that there are perennial unchanging religious truths, but our understanding of them remains contingent on our knowledge in the fields of science and philosophy. Unlike Ali Shariati, who turned to Marxism to bring a historicist perspective to the Shiite thought, Soroush debates the relation between democracy and religion and discusses the possibility of what he calls “Islamic democracy”.  According to Abdolkarim Soroush , the role of the philosopher,  is to try to reconcile religion and freedom, to give an understandable new definition of religion and to link democracy and religion. What Soroush has been trying to do during the past decade is convince his fellow citizens that it is possible to be Muslim and to believe in democracy. Soroush stresses that there were two views of religion, a maximalist and a minimalist one.  In the maximalist view, according to him, everything has to be derived from religion, and most of the current problems in Islam come from this view. But the minimalist view implies that some values cannot be derived from religion, like respect for human rights. For Soroush the maximalist view of religion has to be replaced by a minimalist view, otherwise the balance between Islam and democracy would not be possible. Therefore, for Soroush a democratic Islamic society would not need any Islamic norms from above.

Mojtahed Shabestari, is among the rare religious intellectuals in Iran who has challenged the monistic view of Islam. According to Shabestari, the official Islamic discourse in Iran has created a double crisis. The first crisis is due to the belief that Islam encompasses a political and economic system offering an answer relevant to all the historical periods; the second crisis is entailed by the conviction that the government has to apply Islamic law (shariah) as such. These two ideas have emerged, according to Shabestari, in relation to the Islamic revolution and the events that followed it.  But the fact is, according to Shabestari, that Islam does not have all the answers to social, economic and political life at all times in history.  Also, there is no single hermeneutics of Islam as such. Therefore, the relation between religion and ideology is simply unacceptable and leads to the desacralization of religion.

It is a fact the religious intellectuals do not dominate the entire Iranian public sphere. Next to them, one can consider a group of Iranian intellectuals inside and outside Iran who do not attempt to promulgate any ideologies or to struggle for the establishment of an Islamic democracy in Iran and yet they undermine the main philosophical and intellectual concepts of the established order.  This generation is mainly characterized by the secular post-revolutionary intellectuals, such as Javad Tabatabai, Babak Ahmadi, Hamid Azodanloo, Moosa Ghaninejad, Nasser Fakouhi, Farzin Vahdat, Mehrzad Boroujerdi, Setareh Hooman and Fatemeh Sadeghi, who are some in their fifties, and who can be referred to as the “dialogical intellectuals” (in contrast with the revolutionary intellectuals of the 1970s and early 1980s). In other words, for this group of Iranian intellectuals, the concept and the practice of dialogue provide an ontological umbrella for all the political and cultural meanings and understandings. The very objective of this “culture of dialogue” is no more to consider the other as an “enemy” (who needs to be terminated as an individual or as a social c1ass), but to promote a full acknowledgement of the other as a subject. In this case different intellectual attitudes are asked to co-exist side by side to find an intersubjective basis for their search of modernity and democracy. This move away from master ideologies among this new generation of Iranian intellectuals is echoed by distrust in any metaphysically valorized form of monist thinking. Unlike the previous generations of Iranian intel1ectuals, what the critica1 thinking of modernity has taught the dialogical generation is to adopt a general attitude that consists of being at odds both with “fundamentalist politics” and with “utopian rationalities”. This philosophical wariness is not joined to any kind of dream of rearranging totally the Iranian society. The intervention here is not only a reflection upon the pluralistic mechanisms of politics, but also upon the political self. This issue of value-pluralism also raises the question of the West as the “other” in the context of modernizing projects. As an antidote to the “monolithic” and “one-view” formulas of the previous generations, the political and intellectual urgency of Iran's encounter with the globalized modernity acquires a “dialogical and cross-cultural exchange”. This dialogue is an exposure of the Iranian consciousness to the “otherness” of the modern West. It requires from the “Iranian intellectual a willingness to risk its political and intellectual attitudes and to plunge headlong into a transformative process instead of being in full position of imitation or ideological rejection of modernity. In this cross-cultural dialogue, modernity is no more reduced to a status of a simple technical and instrumental object or rejected as a dangerous enemy of the Iranian identity. Maybe for the first time, since Iran's encounter with the West, modernity is finally considered as a process which could provide us lessons for the affirmation of our own identity without having fears of recognizing the heritage of modern times as ours. In helping to maintain this dialogical exchange with modernity, the dialogical generation of Iranian intellectuals frees itself from the intellectual blackmail of “being for or against the West”. At a close look, things become more complex and modernity is no more considered as a “package deal”, but as a destiny that invites us to face up the questions of our time. The question of globalized modernity and its debate with the concept of Iranian traditions has become the central question of Iranian intellectuals 30 years after the Iranian revolution. What is important in the work of dialogical intellectuals in Iran is that they think neither of imitating the West nor of turning the clock back to Iranian traditions. For them unlike many religious intellectuals the philosophical goal is neither to inject modernity into religion nor to inject religion into modernity. What is in perspective here is to rescue the concept of the intellectual from that of ideology by returning history from the political to the cultural. As such, as long as the concept of “intellectual” remains in dispute in Iran, one can also keep a more critical view on the nature of Iranian intellectual history.  This process offers a new working and changing definition of “intellectual” in Iran while describing the legitimacy crisis of the intellectual fashions in Iran. If Iranian intellectual are really committed to the notion of critical thinking and free inquiry, then they cannot stop their inquiring minds at the gates of any religion or any ideology. And yet, that is precisely what has happened in Iran in the past 100 years, where many intellectual issues became taboos. The only way for Iranian intellectuals today to break the taboos of their traditions is to have the critical and cross-cultural training to understand the contemporary world.

One of the biggest problems of the Iranian society lies in the inability of intellectuals to make up their minds about who they are. Are they specialized experts and professionals operating within specific market-oriented and technophilic spheres, adapting rapidly with the changing economic and political situations? Or independent souls whose only commitment is to truth and who add their voices to the public debates in the world? In my humble opinion, intellectuals in Iran have to confront this dilemma and draw the necessary conclusions for the future of intellectualism in Iran. For a long period of time Iran suffered from the existence of intellectual elites who gave up their intellectual habits and submitted to the strict rules of ideologies such as Marxism-Leninism or Islamism. As a result, these intellectuals have been to great degree traitors to their own status and very often re-interpreters of the political realities of Iran and the world in accord with their purposes, while closing their eyes to truth. Intellectuals assisted the spread of ideological messages in Iran, whatever they were, by becoming the icons of discontented, disillusioned and frustrated generations anxious for change and peace. Political parties and clergy used the intellectuals to extend their organizational power and political control. An intellectual struggle in Iran is not only of a political nature, but also a permanent struggle against what Michel de Certeau calls "an enforced belief". A public intellectual in Iran should act as a check on this enforced belief and bring forward a new tone of debate in the public sphere. This desire for a critical rather than an ideological discussion is exemplified by what we can call the coming to terms of Iranian intellectuals with their past and present. To do such a thing, intellectuals in Iran need to position themselves outside the masses and question in a radical way the very idea of the "public sphere" itself. Beyond the choice between tradition and modernity, there is a world of conflict and vision that can stimulate the contributions made by intellectuals to the public debate in Iran. This contribution is accompanied by the re-interpenetration of Iranian traditions in the context of a dialogical exchange with the global world. Therefore, it is natural that intellectuals in Iran try to root themselves in a national culture, but it is even more natural that they feel a need to be nurtured by multicultural roots. This philosophical practice emerges as the re-appropriation of the ethical into the political context, in contrast with the practices of the theological, but also in opposition to the ideological dogmas of the Left and the Right. In other words, the dialogical intellectual in Iran needs to put morality ahead of politics. This has not yet happened.  Iranian intellectuals cannot overcome the limitations of their age and society, and jump over Rhodes (to use Hegel's memorable phrase), but they can certainly bridge the gap between the Iranian society and the world by rethinking their own history in terms of the ethical imperative rather political pragmatism.