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Reasonableness, Rationality and Government: The Liberal Political Thought of Mehdi Ha’eri Yazdi

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Meysam Badamchi
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Abstract

Rawls formulates liberalism according to two conceptions of reasonable and rational, which, tied to two particular notions of society and person, define the basis of liberalism in Rawlsian thought. This article argues that Mehdi Haeri Yazdi's important work, Hekmat va Hokumaat, should be considered as a work of liberal theory, and shows how it endorses liberal conceptions of the reasonable and the rational. The main elements of Ha'eri's liberalism are his thesis that philosophy has priority over jurisprudence, his doctrine of contract based upon concepts of agency contract (aqd-e vekalat) and joint private ownership (malekiyat-e shakhsi-ye musha), and his defense of individualism against the alleged collectivism of Rousseau.

Type
Articles
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 47 , Issue 4 , June 2014 , pp. 519 - 534
Copyright
Copyright © The International Society for Iranian Studies 2014

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Footnotes

This research was supported by TÜBİTAK (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey) [2216].

References

1 Mehdi Ha'eri Yazdi was the son of the renowned Grand Ayatollah Abdulkarim Ha'eri Yazdi, one of main Shiite authorities (maraje’) of his time, and the one who made Qom the main site of Shi'a studies in Iran. At the age of twenty-eight he received his ordination as exegesis (ejtehad), the highest degree in traditional Islamic sciences, particularly Islamic law, from Grand Ayatollah Borujerdi, the main Shi'a authority after the death of his father. In 1952, Tehran University accepted Ha'eri's ejtehad degree as equivalent to a doctorate degree in theology and he became a faculty member of Tehran University's theology department. Later, he enrolled in the PhD program at the University of Toronto, where he received another doctorate in 1979. In 1979, he returned to Iran to resume his post as professor of Islamic philosophy at Tehran University and his association with the Iranian Academy of Philosophy. He died in Tehran in July 1999, aged seventy-six. Apart from Hekmat va Hokumat, discussed in this article, he wrote ten other books, mainly about Islamic philosophy. Other than The Principles of Epistemology in Islamic Philosophy; Knowledge by Presence (1992), all his books, including Hekmat va Hokumat, are in Persian. All Persian to English translations are by the author unless otherwise mentioned.

2 Rawls, John, Political Liberalism (New York, 1996), 48–49.Google Scholar

3 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 49. Here I need to address one possible objection. In Political Liberalism, Rawls also articulates a second criterion for reasonableness that I have neglected in my interpretation. This element is what Rawls calls “the burdens of judgment.” What is my argument for this omission? In my interpretation of political liberalism, it seems acceptable to keep the first condition of reasonableness, i.e. willingness to get involved in social cooperation provided that others do the same, and exclude the second one, i.e. the burdens of judgment. It seems to me that including the appropriate conceptions of person and society is both a necessary and sufficient criterion for the reasonableness of a doctrine. Put another way, the burdens of judgment apparently can be discarded without resulting in a significant problem for maintaining the main ideas of political liberalism, such as public reason, the original position, the reflective equilibrium, overlapping consensus, etc. As Wenar argues, there seems to be no strong argument proving that abandonment of the burdens of judgment is fatal for the entire Rawlsian project of political liberalism. Furthermore, the burdens of judgment seem to be incompatible with the firm religious beliefs of the faithful, and one might even argue that excluding them from the criterion of reasonableness is a recommendable step for applying political liberalism to more religious societies, including Muslim majority ones. Wenar suggests that the burdens of judgment are not acceptable for many religious believers, such as Catholics. Similarly, Andrew March argues that to base political liberalism's normativity on the burdens of judgment may make genuine overlapping consensus between orthodox Islamic law and political liberalism questionable. Thus, there seem to be enough reasons for excluding the burdens of judgment from the criteria of reasonableness, and keeping only the first condition. In other words, I consider reasonableness mainly as being ready to propose principles of fair cooperation and to abide by them provided that others do the same. See Rawls, Political Liberalism, 54f; Leif Wenar, “Political Liberalism: An Internal Critique,” Ethics 106 (October 1995), 41f; March, Andrew, Islam and Liberal Citizenship: The Search for an Overlapping Consensus (Oxford, 2009), 272–3CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 50–51.

5 Ibid., 14; cf. 107f. Rawls also mentions a third idea of “a well-ordered society as a society effectively regulated by a political conception of justice.” However, it can be argued that the elements of the idea of a well-ordered society are already embedded in the two ideas of society as a fair system of cooperation and persons as free and equal citizens. Put another way, the idea of a well-ordered society seems to be a combination of the main elements of the politically liberal conceptions of society and person. Rawls clearly implies this when he says “a well-ordered society” is “a fair system of cooperation between reasonable and rational citizens regarded as free and equal.” See ibid., 103.

6 Ibid., 108.

7 Ibid., 72.

8 Ibid., 19–20.

9 Ibid., 30.

10 Ibid., 33.

11 Ibid., 33; cf. 72.

12 Ibid., 72f.

13 Ibid., 49–50.

14 Ibid., 15.

15 Ibid., 16.

16 Ibid., 18.

17 Ibid., 30.

18 Ibid., 74.

19 Yazdi, Mehdi Ha'eri, Jostarha-ye Falsafi (Tehran, 2005), 411–12Google Scholar.

20 Yazdi, Mehdi Ha'eri, Hekmat va Hokumat (London, 1995), 11–15Google Scholar.

21 Ibid., 64–5.

22 Ibid., 54–5.

23 Khomeini, Imam, Governance of the Jurist (Velayat-e Faqeeh): Islamic Government, trans. Algar, Hamid (Tehran: n.d.), 19Google Scholar. Available online at: http://www.iranchamber.com/history/rkhomeini/books/velayat_faqeeh.pdf (accessed 9 April 2014).

24 Ibid., 29.

25 Ha'eri, Hekmat va Hokumat, 177; cf. 61, 57, 178.

26 Ibid., 57.

27 al-fuqahā husūn ul-Islam kahusnu sur al-madinatu lahā, and al-fuqahā umanā ul-rusul, two hadiths from the sixth Imam of the Shi'as, Imam Jafar Sadiq. See Yaqub Koleyni, “Ketab-e Aqlo Jahl” (The Chapter of Reason and Ignorance), Usul-e Kafi; quoted in Ha'eri, Hekmat va Hokumat, 180.

28 Ibid., 187.

29 Ibid., 188–91.

30 Ibid., 142–3; cf. 168–76.

31 In Ha'eri's interpretation, this verse of the Qur'an refers to this fact when Allah says to the Prophet: “Certainly was Allah pleased with the believers when they pledged allegiance to you, [O Muhammad], under the tree, and He knew what was in their hearts, so He sent down tranquility upon them and rewarded them with an imminent conquest” (Qur'an, Sūra48: āyat:18, translated by Sahih international translation, http://quran.com). According to this verse, Ha'eri (Hekmat va Hokumat) argues, revelation appoints an infallible prophet or Imam as the political leader only if the people's consensus already exists. Ibid., 168.

32 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 50. For Rawls, a country will have a stable liberal democracy only if the number of people who adhere to unreasonable doctrines (e.g. guardianship of the jurist) is “outweighed by the appropriate conduct of a sufficient number of others.” See Rawls, John, The Law of Peoples: With “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited” (Cambridge, MA, 1999), 15Google Scholar.

33 We should not interpret Hekmat va Hokumat's state of nature as an actual state, nor should we interpret its agency contract as an agreement that actually took place. In other words, Ha'eri is not concerned with giving an historical account of how government came about. Rather, his doctrine is best viewed not as explaining the origin of government, but rather as an attempt to provide “philosophical knowledge” about the concept of the state so that we can better understand our political rights and obligations when such a government exists. Here I am following Rawls's interpretation of Hobbesian contractarianism. See Rawls, John, Lectures on History of Political Philosophy, ed. Freeman, Samuel (Cambridge, MA, 2007), 30–32Google Scholar.

34 Ha'eri, Hekmat va Hokumat, 99.

35 Ibid., 96–105.

36 Man sabaqa ilā ma lam yasbaq fahuva ahaqqu bihi. See Hurr-i Amuli, ed., “Ādabu al-Tijara,” Vasā’lu al-Shi'a , vol. 12; quoted in ibid., 104.

37 Ibid., 104.

38 Ibid., 97.

39 Ibid., 85.

40 See Rawls, Political Liberalism, 16f.

41 Ha'eri, Hekmat va Hokumat, 113.

42 Ibid., 120–21.

43 See Kymlicka, Will, Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction (Oxford, 2002), 3fGoogle Scholar.

44 Ha'eri, Hekmat va Hokumat, 215–20.

45 Ibid., 85–95; cf. 466–73.

46 Ibid., 381.

47 Yazdi, Mehdi Ha'eri, Falsafe-ye Tahlili va Nazariye-ye Shenakht dar Falsafe-ye Eslami: Taqrirat-e Ostad Mehdi Ha'eri Yazdi, ed. Nasri, Abdollah (Tehran, 2006), 24–9; cf. 45–7Google Scholar.

48 A careful reading of Rousseau's Social Contract may prove that Ha'eri's reading of Rousseau is problematic and unfaithful to the text. Nevertheless, I will not go into this debate here. See Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. Gourevitch, Victor (Cambridge, 1997)Google Scholar.

49 Ha'eri, Hekmat va Hokumat, 122–6; cf. 111.

50 Ibid., 126.

51 Ibid., 177–8; cf. 57, 61.

52 Ibid., 159.

53 Ibid., 112.

54 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 217.

55 Ha'eri, Hekmat va Hokumat, 148–50; cf. 127–30, 166–8.

56 Ha'eri's argument here is partly based on Muslim theologians' distinction between God's cosmic will (erade-ye takvini) and his revealed will (erade-ye tashri'i). See ibid., 127–9.

57 Ibid., 324–5.

58 Ha'eri does not make clear what he means by the voluntary status of Islamic law. For example, one might ask whether Ha'eri's theory would permit orthodox Muslims, in a Muslim majority society, to adhere voluntarily to discriminatory parts of shari'a, such as hudud penalties, as an expression of their religious freedom or not. In my understanding, Ha'eri's interpretation of hudud, as one of the most controversial parts of shari'a regarding human rights, might be similar to Mohammad Fadel's interpretation when he argues that Rawls's political liberalism could be compatible with hudud penalties if those punishments were regarded only as voluntary. Put another way, Fadel believes that only if regarded as choice-based will the justification for the hudud penalties be religious, rather than secular. Fadel admits that in practice very few Muslims will volunteer to be penalized by the hudud. See Fadel, Mohammad, “Public Reason as a Strategy for Principled Reconciliation: The Case of Islamic Law and International Human Rights Law,” Chicago Journal of International Law 8, no. 1 (2007): 16–20Google Scholar.

59 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 31.