Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-gb8f7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-23T21:01:49.951Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Becoming Mollah: Reflections on Iranian Clerics in a Revolutionary Age

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Michael M. J. Fischer
Michael M. J. Fischer*
Affiliation:
Rice University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The role of religion and of clerics in the events leading to and during the Iranian revolution of 1977-79 provides an instructive exercise in formulating a theory of cultural influence. The institution of religious training (the madrasah system) has been in decay and under political pressure throughout this century. That the clergy should have emerged as central actors in the revolution, therefore, says something about their cultural, rather than institutional, centrality. The popular idioms of Islamic protest—deriving from the story of Karbala and from the modernist reformulations associated with Dr. Ali Shari'ati—are elaborated with reference to the learning of the madrasahs. That forms of open, secular, political discourse were suppressed under the Pahlavi monarchy helped ensure that Islamic rhetorics would become the idiom of political debate and helped give clerics (both preachers and teachers) extra leverage. The struggle over the role of the clerics continues, a struggle in which Ayatollah Khomeini himself has intervened by drawing ambiguous distinctions between obfuscatory clerics and revolutionary ones, and by chastising clerics for meddling beyond their competence.

Type
Research Article
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 13 , Issue 1-4: Iranian Revolution in Perspective , 1980 , pp. 83 - 117
Copyright
Copyright © Association For Iranian Studies, Inc 1980

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1. The proverb refers to the story of Satan, dismissed from heaven by God because he refused to bow to Adam. Satan's sin was pride in his own reason. (Compare Ecclesiastes: “Do not be overly righteous.”) God ordered the angels to bow to Adam, but Satan refused because God previously had ordered monotheism: one should bow to no one but God. The relative perfections of angels and men is the subject of much theological and moral banter: angels have no passion, hence their virtues are not achievements, not the result of moral struggle. Mohammad Iqbal elaborated on the struggle: Iblis (Satan) lures Adam/man out of paradise, but when man finally achieves victory over Satan, Satan performs the prostration before the Perfect Man (ensan-e kamel) which he had refused to perform before the unexperienced, morally innocent, Adam. The Perfect Man (who has fulfilled the potentials of the human self and approached God) then can proclaim with the Prophet, “Aslama shaytani” (my Satan has surrendered to me, he has become Muslim): the jihad-e akbar (the greater holy war) has been won. See Schimmel, A., “Iqbal and Goethe” in Iqbal, Essays and Studies, ed. Ansari, A. (New Delhi, 1978), pp. 279–80.Google Scholar

2. Edited by Shakeri in 1971 and published in Mashad by Tus Publishers; an abridged English translation was prepared in 1977 by Mehdi Abedi and myself with financial support from the Center for Middle East Studies at Harvard. A detailed summary and analysis is in press: “Portrait of a Mulla: the Autobiography and Bildungsroman of Aqa Najafi-Quchani (1875-1943),” Persica (forthcoming).

3. The only other reasonably full autobiographies roughly comparable are the briefer and less humorous seventeenth-century account of Sayyed Ni'matu'allah al-Jaza'iri, summarized by E. G. Browne (1928: IV: 361-67); and the polemical autobiography of Ahmad Kasravi, who was trained as a cleric and then became one of their most powerful opponents. See also the biographical account of Siyuti: Sartain, E. M., Jalal-al-Din al-Siyuti: Biography and Background (New York, 1975).Google Scholar

4. Aqa Najafi Quchani declared himself a mojtahed when he discovered that Sayyed Kazem Yazdi, one of the great mojtaheds in Najaf, made simple mistakes in geography, knew little outside the religious disciplines, and took the know-nothing attitude that one ought not to study philosophy lest it damage faith.

5. On velayat-e faqih, see Fischer, M., Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 151–55Google Scholar; and Akhavi, S., Religion and Politics in Contemporary Iran (Albany, 1980), pp. 64–66.Google Scholar

6. On the problem of revolutionary and Islamic justice, see M. Fischer, “Iran and Islamic Justice,” Middle East Executive Reports (January 1980) and “Legal Postulates in Flux: Justice, Wit and Hierarchy in Iran,” in The Politics of Law in the Middle East, ed. D. Dwyer, forthcoming.

7. See Fazlur Rahman's exasperated sketch of how the puritan reformers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in their attack on scholasticism in favor of ijtihad and political engagement, threw out the scholarly knowledge of history and evaluative skills along with the archaisms, ritualisms, and legalisms, resulting in simplistic sloganeering. Rahman, F., “Islam: Legacy and Contemporary Challenge” in Islam: in the Contemporary World, ed. Pullapilly, C. K. (Notre Dame, 1980).Google Scholar Similar charges are made by Laroui. See Laroui, A., The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual (Berkeley, 1976).Google Scholar

8. Laroui argues that just as the distinction was drawn in the days of the prophet between true believers (muminin), converts to Islam of unsure belief (muslimin), hypocrites (munafiqun), and unbelievers (kafirun and dhimmi), so too classical writers distinguished between the realities of the patrimonial sultanates which they could only urge to be more just and an ideal community of believers in which each individual was so inspired by Islam that there need be little state apparatus at all. Such an ideal state did not even exist under the prophet. A. Laroui, “Islamic Theories of State.” Lecture given at Harvard Center for Middle East Studies on February 24, 1981. Modern activists counter that the implication that Islam has little contribution to make to actual politics is manifestly not the case.

9. In his speech on the second anniversary of the revolution (February 11, 1981), he had his son read twice a sentence enjoining mullahs from interfering in affairs beyond their competence.

10. These appeared in issues 12 and 13 of Ahangar. I am indebted to Ervand Abrahamian for passing them on to me.

11. See the excerpts translated in Tell the American People: Perspectives on the Iranian Revolution, ed. Albert, D. (Philadelphia, 1980).Google Scholar

12. The chart and the following comments are explored more fully in M. Fischer, “Representing Islam and Politics,” Daedalus, forthcoming 1981.

13. S. A. Arjomand, “The Shi'ite Hierarchy and the State in Iran under the Early Qajars 1785-1848,” unpublished M.S., 1978, “The Office of Mulla-Bashi in Shi'ite Iran,” unpublished M.S., n.d.

14. Analogy (qiyas), considered the fourth basis by Sunnis, is rejected by Shi'ites, who cite the example of Satan as following false analogy.

15. Aqa Najafi Quchani (no relation) dismisses these brothers, although formally the leaders of the madrasah system in Isfahan, as intriguers who are not particularly learned. He directs our attention instead to the teachers whose renown is maintained by their students to this day: Jahangir Khan Qashqa'i, Sayyed Mohammad Baqer Dorchehi, and Shaykh Abdol-Karim Gazi. The Najafi brothers are known to anyone who has read through the British political reports of the period or through the archives of the London-based Church Missionary Society, as having led demonstrations and agitations against the missionaries, against Bahais and Babis, and against British imperialism.

16. Cited in Coles, Robert, Flannery O'Connor's South (Louisiana, 1980), p. 99.Google Scholar

17. This section, originally entitled, “The Ayatullah as Allegory: A Walter Benjaminite Interpretation of Khomeyni's Mesmerism,” has been presented to anthropology colloquia at the University of Chicago and Rice University. I am grateful for reactions and suggestions by both audiences.

18. See Bruce Mazlish, “The Hidden Khomeini,” New York, December 24, 1979, for an attempt to draw a psychological profile out of the same body of facts.

19. See also M. Bateson, “This Figure of Tinsel: A Study of Themes of Hypocrisy and Pessimism in Iranian Culture,” Daedalus (1979), pp. 125-36.

20. See Tyler, Steven, The Said and the Unsaid (New York, 1978).Google Scholar

21. Cited in Coles, op. cit., p. 59.