Description
Iran’s Islamic revolution in 1979 and the subsequent institution of an Islamic system of governance based on the theory of the Velayat-e Faqih (the guardianship of the Islamic jurist) is par excellence an example of political theology in practice denoting the entanglement between religion and politics and how they relate to each other. The Islamic revolution has conventionally been viewed as an outcome of endogenous circumstances in Iran paralleling the general treatment of political Islam as something integrally related to Islam itself. Contrary to this conventional belief, this paper argues that the discourses of Ahmad Fardid, Jalal Al-e Ahmad, Ali Shari’ati, who were the intellectual forefathers of Iran’s Islamic revolution, were not solely the product of endogenous societal, material, and intellectual conditions and circumstances, but were also significantly influenced by the counter-Enlightenment philosophies of European philosophers. As a case in point, the paper explores in particular how Martin Heidegger’s theological-philosophical concept and discussion of Eigentlichkeit (authenticity) in Being and Time and his critique of modernity as a malaise that had caused alienation from the self through technology and machines in “Letter on Humanism”, influenced the discourses of Fardid, Al-e Ahmad, and Shari’ati’s and their identification of the malady of Westoxification (gharbzadegi) and the need to return to the authentic Islamic-Iranian self (Bazgasht be khish) that were both part and parcel of the spirit of the Islamic revolution. More broadly, the paper argues that this entangled intellectual history illustrates the interconnectedness of political Islamic discourses with various currents of Western philosophy instead of the conventional distinction between an Islamic ‘inside’ and an outside that exists and is separated from it.
