Chapter Six - Postrevolutionary Islamic Modernity in Iran: The Intersubjective Hermeneutics of Mohamad Mojtahed Shabestari

Summary

Postrevolutionary Islamic thought in Iran is very much characterized by a hermeneutic approach. However, the hermeneutics involved in this thought are of a different nature from those of its predecessors, that is the Islamic revolutionary discourses of the 1960s and –70s. The contemporary Islamic discourse in Iran is no longer engaged primarily in direct interpretation of Qur'anic verses, and much less so of the Tradition (Hadith). The chief reason for this turn of events, it seems, is the peculiar nature of sociopolitical developments in Iran, particularly the advent of the Islamic Revolution and its complex relations with the forces of the modern world. The Islamic revolutionary discourse of the previous generation undoubtedly advanced serious challenges to the discourse of modernity. Yet, in its own discourse, the Islamic thought of the revolutionary era was itself very much affected by the discourse of modernity, mostly at the philosophical and theoretical levels. Thus, many of the figures who contributed to the Islamic thought of the 1960s and –70s were in one way or another involved in the interpretation of the Qur'an, and to a lesser extent the Tradition, in light of what they considered to be the essential elements of modernity. Ali Shariati (1933–1977), Ayatollah Mahmud Taleqani (1911–1979), Mehdi Bazargan (1907–1995) and Ayatollah Morteza Motahhari (1920–1979) were the most prominent of those who were more or less directly involved in their discourses in reinterpreting Qur'anic verses, in light of what each believed to be the crucial aspects of the modern civilization. In contrast, the post-revolutionary Islamic discourses, and especially those articulated by Mohamad Mojtahed Shabestari and Abdulkarim Sorush, have, by and large, refrained from interpreting the Qur'anic text directly. It would appear that the post-revolutionary conditions have led to different sets of interests and preoccupations among contemporary Islamic thinkers in Iran.

The main reason for this shift from a Qur'anic exegetic approach to that of a hermeneutics that is not primarily based on the Qur'an lies in the peculiar nature of the Islamic revolutionary paradigm of the previous generation. The logic of the revolutionary discourse of the founders of the Islamic state could not have developed any further because of the particular fashion in which the metaphysics of the Qur'anic text was interpreted to construct a notion of human subjectivity and agency which could not proceed any further, in the context of a deeply religious society.