Postrevivalist Islam or Traumatic Resecularization? What Does Historicizing the Religio-Political Unity Offer in the Post-Khomeini Iranian Context?

The postrevolutionary Iranian “Islamic revivalists” (who now call themselves “principlists”) still evoke an early twentieth-century event that—in their collective reconstruction of the past—crucially grafted politics onto religion. A foreign-backed military coup d'état elevated an anti-Islamic modernizer to the position of power, enabling him to tragically crush the only voice that genuinely represented the anti-dictatorial and anti-colonial popular will. “Our religion is the essence of our politics, and our politics is the essence of our religion,” a saying attributed to “Martyr” Seyyed Hasan Modarres (d. 1937), the prominent Shi‘i mujtahid and long-term political opponent of Reza Khan, thus serves as the emotional and (formerly counter-) intuitive basis for the continued necessity of an Islamic theocratic state as a bulwark against secularizing forces inside and outside the country. Against this backdrop, religiously-minded postrevolutionary reformists (known in Iran as “religious intellectuals”) who dare to suggest separation, in one way or another, of religion from politics run the risk of being labeled as “secularists.” It was not a mere coincidence, therefore, that both the December 2012 issue of the most liberal Tehran monthly Mehrnameh and a June 2013 principlist political documentary featuring them adopted as their title “We are not secular,” a quote from prominent reformist-intellectual Saeed Hajjarian.

After reviewing past-evoking claims made both for and against separating religion from politics and dynamic contentious interaction between the two opposing camps in Iran for the last two decades, this paper will reflect on two important questions. Is resecularization, be it generally conceived or analyzed in one national context, simply the reverse process of desecularization? Does historicizing secularities (and, for that matter, de-secularities) serve as means by which not only fresh reconstructions of collective memories are facilitated but also institutional reforms for accommodating pluralistic understandings of the religio-political unity may become possible?