Chapter Five - Mehdi Haeri Yazdi and the Discourse of Modernity

Summary

The thought of Mehdi Haeri Yazdi can potentially occupy a very significant place in the current debates on modernity and Islam in Iran. His expertise in Islamic philosophy and other Islamic fields of learning as well as his formal training in modern Western philosophical traditions enabled Haeri to explore the fundamental issues of modernity and Islam deeply.

A relative paucity of the ideological and polemical elements usually involved in a discussion of modernity and Islam characterizes Haeri's discourse. This can be attributed not only to the high level of abstraction in which he engaged with the philosophical aspects of the question of Islam and modernity, but also to his personal sensibility, which seems to have disposed him toward an elitist attitude in his writing that made him deliberately shun writing for a larger public, which is in sharp contrast to other contemporary Islamic thinkers in Iran. For this reason, his thought, the promulgation of which spanned some three decades, may seem inaccessible even to experts and as a result has not received the attention that it deserves. In this chapter I intend to present his work to a wider audience and bring out the significance of his thought as it regards the issues of modernity and Islam in Iran and possibly other Islamic societies.

For this reason, I propose that the best way to analyze Haeri's thought on modernity is to view his discourse along three different dimensions or levels of analysis. The first dimension, and the deepest level, is his discussion of ontology or more accurately theontology. At this level, which is the most abstract and comprises a large portion of his discourse, Haeri deals with questions such as existence—that is, God's and humans’ locations in this vast and esoteric expanse. The second level is what may be called his philosophy of ethics or practical reason, in which he discussed the philosophical principles governing human action and ethics. The third, least abstract dimension is a discussion of political and social issues that Haeri derived from the two previous dimensions.

The main thesis of this chapter suggests that at the first level, the theontological dimension, Haeri posited the notion of subjectivity primarily for the Being and the Divine, and human subjectivity assumed a secondary and derivative status.