by PATRICK HASSAN & DABBAGH HOSSEIN
Postcolonial intellectuals and Iran’s rulers agree that secularism is just Western imperialism in disguise. They are wrong
The latest waves of uprisings in Iran following the movement in defence of Iranian women’s freedoms are among the most significant since the Islamic Republic was established after the overthrow of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in 1979. The regime’s resulting crackdown has led to mass arrests and prison sentences, as well as a string of executions. These uprisings are symptomatic of prolonged and multifaceted discontent with the Islamic Republic’s perceived governance. One of the oft-cited causes is growing dissatisfaction with principles of government grounded in a religious worldview, and its subsequent patterns of civil liberty violations. The most visible of these violations, which has served as a focal point for resistance, is the law of mandatory hijab for women.
Gathering reliable empirical data on religious belief in Iran is difficult – apostasy (at least from Islam) is illegal and punishable by death under the vaguely defined crime of Ifsad-e-filarz, or ‘corruption on Earth’. Nevertheless, some available evidence from 2020 suggests predominant opposition to mandatory hijab, to the extent that even some hijabi women have joined the protests to defend everyone’s equal right to liberty. More recent evidence from 2022 also suggests a significant favourable shift towards secularism broadly, with the majority in favour of a separation of religious and civil affairs. Some contemporary research has suggested that, ironically, Iranian theocracy has triggered these trends, which have naturally raised the question of the role of religion in Iranian society.
Although the popular Iranian resistance chant ‘Zan, Zendegi, Azadi’ (‘Woman, Life, Freedom’) speaks to the potential promise of secular change, a recurring criticism of calls for a secular Iran emanates from a suspicion that secularism is a thinly veiled imperialist or colonialist tool for subversion, dressed up in the language of freedom and human rights. Antisecularism as a form of anticolonialism was a consistent and fundamental theme of revolutionary discourse among clerical factions in the lead-up to the 1979 Iranian revolution. It remains so to the present day, and is even repeated by allegedly Left-leaning non-Iranian factions in Europe and North America impressed with postcolonial theory. Our aim is to, first, clearly reconstruct the anti-imperialist argument against a secular Iran in an attempt to understand the professed motivation of its proponents. We then argue that, on the contrary, the argument is feeble, at least as it is commonly deployed: secularism’s inherent merits can be (and routinely are) divorced from any alleged use of it as a colonial imposition.
Shortly after Ayatollah Khomeini gained power in 1979, a new constitution was instituted that sought to embody the religious principles derived from the Twelver Ja?far? school of Shia Islam. This constitution explicitly sets as its foundational principles ‘a system based on belief in … the One God … His exclusive sovereignty and right to legislate, and the necessity of submission to His commands’ and ‘Divine revelation and its fundamental role in setting forth the laws’ (Article 2). The constitution clearly expresses how ‘All civil, penal, financial, economic, administrative, cultural, military, political, and other laws and regulations must be based on Islamic criteria’ (Article 4), going on to proclaim the Twelver Ja?far? school of Islam as the official state religion (Article 12).
Clearly, this theocratic framework of governance is fundamentally at odds with secular approaches to the political domain. Secularism is the view that participants in public political discourse should never be in a position to assume that their interlocutors share the same religious assumptions and, as a result, the state ought to be neutral in matters of religious belief when determining public policy. Contrary to some persisting views, this does not amount to ‘state-enforced atheism’, but rather a disfavouring of religious privilege in civil matters and a favouring of impartiality and pluralism in an attempt to guarantee equal opportunities and respect for citizens, regardless of their religious beliefs, or lack of them. The corollary principle for the practical implementation of this position is that any appeal to religious reasons in public political discourse is insufficient to justify laws that would coerce citizens into certain kinds of behaviours. One of the most influential modern justifications for secularism was offered by John Locke in his Letter on Toleration (1689):
I esteem it above all things necessary to distinguish exactly the Business of Civil Government from that of Religion, and to settle the just Bounds that lie between the one and the other. If this be not done, there can be no end put to the Controversies that will be always arising, between those that have, or at least pretend to have, on the one side, a Concernment for the Interest of Men’s Souls, and on the other side, a Care of the Commonwealth.
Secularism seems reasonable because it is very rare for an entire nation to share belief in one source of law as an authority, let alone share the same interpretation of that law. Because there is no widespread informed agreement about which religion (if any) is the ‘correct’ one, our epistemic limitations dictate that it is prudent to avoid basing civil laws upon any of them, with an eye to protecting the civil rights of all citizens. In nations with significant religious diversity, this form of neutrality is all the more pressing.
Secularism can itself become oppressive if it assumes that the outcome of secular legislation is ‘sacred’
However, it might be argued that the type of ‘neutrality’ that secularism depends upon is a myth. The way we define and conceptualise neutrality is almost always rooted in the structure of the context we live in. The alleged implication is that ‘neutrality’ is not itself neutral. So secularism might be ‘neutral’ based upon one particular type of power structure (ie, the one dominant in the West) but not necessarily those prevalent elsewhere. The anthropologist Saba Mahmood, for example, argued that political secularism’s legal framework is not neutral because an intrinsic part of the nation-state’s structure is shaped by its unique historical norms and values.
This is a fair point to make. The ideal version of pure neutrality does not exist anywhere. Human beings are all situated in particular contexts; hence our value systems for navigating the world are by default contextual. However, this does not entail that we cannot rise from particular contexts and imagine other value systems, nor that some level of neutrality is not achievable. Seeking this level of neutrality towards citizens’ diverse religious beliefs is important because, without it, oppression is an inevitable result. No doubt that secularism can itself become oppressive if it operates under the dubious assumption that the outcome of secular legislation – ie, its contents – is ‘sacred’, and so must be accepted without critical analysis. Under such circumstances, secularism would not respect impartiality and pluralism. Ironically, an example of this is the prohibition on wearing the hijab in public spaces in Iran under the Kashf-e hijab initiative, enforced during the early Pahlavi dynasty from 1936-1941. But, crucially, what explains why such policies ought to be condemned is precisely that they fail to protect beliefs of conscience – of which religious belief is merely one among others – in a tolerant society that achieves an appropriate degree of state neutrality.
The tension between the principles of secularism and the principles of the Islamic Republic is quite deliberate. Properly understanding the function of religion in contemporary Iranian governance requires acknowledging how the notion of an ‘Islamic Republic’ was, and still is, championed as an explicit and allegedly superior alternative to secular governance.
We noted earlier that one of the most pervasive objections to a secular Iran – made by both the current regime and various non-Iranian factions in the Western world – is anchored in an anti-imperialist and postcolonial framework. Some versions of the objection hold, additionally, that secularism is fundamentally antireligious in nature (and therefore anti-Islamic). Combined with a further claim that Islamic ideals are (or ought to be) at the fundamental kernel of Iranian cultural identity, secularism is considered to be anti-Iranian, and a means by which foreign powers have aimed to homogenise the interests and evaluative outlook of Iranians in a way that more closely aligns with their own, thus facilitating a greater sphere of influence and an easier extraction of resources.
This objection has its origins at least partially in dissatisfaction with the rapid state-enforced modernisation instituted by the preceding Pahlavi dynasty (1925-79), where its secularism was concurrent with increased Anglo-American influence in Iranian state affairs and industry, including a CIA-backed coup to oust the nationalist prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh and reinstall the Shah in 1953. But narratives of this kind are not unique to the Iranian sphere – they have found wide acceptance in the Muslim world more broadly. As it emerged in the European context, secularism was a product of widespread debate within those societies, provoked by socioeconomic changes and the concurrent challenges of guaranteeing civil obedience in light of increasingly fracturing religious authorities. But in the Muslim world, modern secularism was typically installed from the top down, first by the colonial powers and then the postcolonial state. As in the case of Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Turkey (arguably similar to Pahlavi Iran), these states were secular autocracies, often installed or heavily supported by Western governments, and they sought to ‘modernise’ their nations in ways felt by many to be too quick. Subsequently, as the contemporary scholar of Islamic studies Muhammad Khalid Masud has noted: ‘Muslim thinkers found it very difficult to understand new ideas like secularism in isolation from Christian (Western colonial) supremacy.’
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