Intellectual movements in Iran: Difference between revisions

Content deleted Content added

Inline

Revision as of 23:00, 2 September 2006

Dariush Shayegan.

Intellectual movements in Iran involve the Iranian experience of modernism, through which Iranian modernity and its associated art, science, literature, poetry, and political structures have been evolving since the 19th century.

History of Persian modernity

Long before the European Renaissance generated the radical ideas that eventually reshaped Europe and the United States, Persian statesmen, artists, and intellectuals had formulated ideas that strikingly anticipate those of modernity. Since more than thousand years ago there has been a conflict in Persia between the search for modernity and the forces of religious obscurantism.

Some twenty five hundred years ago, when Herodotus was writing his Histories, Persia was the West's ultimate other.

File:Cyrus portrait.jpg

Cyrus the Great

It has been a common belief of scholars that modernity began in the West and is by its philosophical nature, economic underpinning, and cultural exigencies a uniquely western phenomenon. All other cultures, those who have lived on the darker side of Renaissance must emulate the Western experinece, if they want to be modern. From Max Weber to Milan Kundera, many Western scholars and writers have argued that everything from representative democracy and rational thought to the art of the novel and the essay are not only western in origin but also uniquely suited to its culture, and native to its temperature climes.

Persia with its impressively rich and varied cultural legacy had a formative role in shaping Western consciousness. The Bible is replete with profuse praise for Persia and its kings. The Bible's praise for Cyrus was partially in recognition of his role in freeing the Jews from their Babylonian captivity; of equal importance was the fact that the vast Persian empire of the time was a paragon of religious and cultural tolerance.

Hegel whose writings are considered by many as the apex of the Western philosophical tradition, uses superlatives in praising the role of Persia and Zarathustra in history.

Hegel wrote his remarks around the time Nietzsche was writing his magnum opus, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Nietzsche's book offers a radical critique, almost a total debunking, of the whole Western tradition of philosophy. It is no mere accident that Nietzsche chose to articulate his critical views in the name of Zarathustra. The end of 19th century was not the only or the last time Zarathustra played a prominent role in shaping Western consciousness and philosophic discourse. In 1990's Persian influences on the millennial fever, and on other New Age themes, were so strong that Harold Bloom, the eminent American critic, suggested that the last decade of the twentieth century should in truth be called a return to Zoroastrian origins.

Western art, no less than history and theology, bear testimony to the ubiquity of the Persian presence in antiquity. Of all the extant works of Greek tragedy, for example, the only one that is about a non-Greek subject is Aeschylus' play The Persians.

Generations of Iranian intellectualls

First generation

The nineteenth century Persian reformers whom we can consider as the first generation of Iranian intellectuals were perfectly conscious of the fact that it was not enough to rely upon the antiquity of Persian civilization to think about its continued ability to survive. They tried to establish a relationship with men of power that would have permitted them to dictate their blueprints for reforms. These blueprints naturally remained without immediate impact among the men of power to whom they were addressed. These intellectual reforms encountered a widespread opposition from the court and the Ulama.

Second generation

The second generation intended to introduce modern civilization to Persia, not only by imitating the West, but through a coherent and systematic approach to European culture. Mohammad Ali Furughi belongs to this generation.

Third generation

File:Abdolhossein Zarrinkoub.jpg

Abdolhossein Zarrinkoub.

Very different from the second generation, perceived as the heir of the Enlightenment, the third generation of Iranian intellectuals was mainly influenced by the totalitarian outlook of Russian Marxism. With the popularity of Marxist ideology among the third generation of Iranian intellectuals, the new culture for translation and knowledge of modernity was drawn inevitably toward moral and political absolutes. Intellectuals claimed to be "givers of lessons" and acted as "moral legislators" who were critics of both the state and the society.

Fourth generation

Fourth generation of Iranian intellectuals are mainly characterized by the journals such as Goftegu and Kiyan. In contrast with the ideological generation of Iranian intellectuals who in their encounter with the western modernity favoured a monistic attitude exemplified by Marxist and Heideggerian philosophies, the Fourth Generation of Iranian intellectuals decided on a move away and a critical distanciation from master ideologies. The methodological position of the new generation of Iranian intellectuals is characterized by two main philosophical attitudes: the extension of an anti-utopian thinking on an intersubjective basis on the one hand, and the urge for a non-imitative dialogical exchange with the modern values of the West on the other.

Modern art movement

See main article Modern and Contemporary Art in Iran

Iranian experience and development of modernity led to a unique style of cinema, painting and music. Iranian New wave, a movement in Iranian cinema, has found worldwide reputation due to its deeply Philosophical, poetic and artistic style. Abbas Kiarostami is the most notable figure in the New wave of Iranian cinema. In the artistic and esthetic realm, features of New wave of Persian cinema, for example the works of Abbas Kiarostami, can be classified as postmodern.

Modern poetry

See main article Persian poetry

Modern Persian poerty came to existence after Nima Yushij. Notable figures are:

Modern literary movement

See main article Persian literature

Literary criticism and comparative literature in Iran entered a new phase in 19th century. Persian literature enjoyed the emergence of influential figures as Sadegh Hedayat, Ahmad Kasravi, Abdolhossein Zarrinkoub, Shahrokh Meskoob, Ebrahim Golestan and Sadegh Choubak.

Modern scientific movement

See main article Iranian science and Iranian contemporary medicine

The history of modern science in Iran dates back to the year 1851 and the establishment of Darolfonoon – which was founded as a result of the efforts of Mirza Taghi Khan Amir Kabir, aiming at training and teaching Iranian experts on many fields of sciences, and it was the future minded Abbas Mirza who first dispatched students to Europe to obtain a western education. ^[1]

File:Jabbari most cited paper.jpg

M.M Sheikh-Jabbari's highly cited paper in high energy physics

By the establishment of Tehran University, science in Iran entered a new phase. Mahmoud Hessaby, Ali Asghar Hekmat, Moslem Bahadori and many others played roles in initiating and forming these movements. The outcome of the movement has been the emergence of researchers who have been trained and received doctorate degrees in the country and have found international reputations. A few of these scientists are: Ahmad Reza Dehpour, Reza Malekzadeh, Mohammad Khorrami, Vahid Karimipour and M.M. Sheikh-Jabbari.

Modernization of Iranian medicine did not occur through the straightforward replacement of traditional Persian medicine by modern European medicine. Rather, the integration of modern medicine went through a long process that included both the reinterpretation of traditional theories by traditional physicians and the assimilation of modern theories through the prism of traditional medicine.[1]

One of the main Iranian scientific movements in late 20th century was in the filed of chemistry and pharmaceutical chemistry. The main leaders of this movement were Abbas Shafiee, Bijan Farzami, Mohammad-Nabi Sarbolouki, Issa Yavari and Ahmad Reza Dehpour. The movement resulted in hundreds of research papers in peer reviewed international journals.

Other notable figures who promoted world-class research in Iran during 20th century are: Reza Mansouri and Yousof Sobouti (Physics), Abolhassan Farhoudi (Immunology), Mohammad Reza Zarrindast (Pharmacology), Fereydoon Davachi (Rheumatology), Ardeshir Ghavamzadeh (Hematology) , Ali Radmehr (Radiology), Hossein Najmabadi (Medical genetics), Hormoz Shams (Ophthalmology), Moslem Bahadori (Pathology), Hormoz Dabirashrafi (Obstetrics and Gynecology), Hossein Estaki (Neuroscience), G.R. Baradaran Khosroshahi (Mathematics) and Caro Lucas (Elect. Eng.).

Iranian women's movement

See also: Iranian women's movement

File:Iranian intellectual women.jpg

The women's movement in modern Iran is nearly 150 years old.

The presence of women in Iranian intellectual movements (science, modern literature, cinema, human-rights activism, etc.) has been remarkable throughout the history of modern Iran. According to the research ministry of Iran, women accounted for 56% of all university students in the natural sciences, including one in five Ph.D. students.

In cinema and the visual arts, Tahmineh Milani, Rakhshan Bani Etemad, and Samira Makhmalbaf created new cinematic styles which have attracted many from all over the world and in international festivals.

Persian poet and literary figure Simin Behbahani was nominated for 1997 Nobel Prize for literature. The 2003 Nobel Peace Prize went to Shirin Ebadi for her efforts for democracy and human rights, especially for the rights of women and children.

Simin Daneshvar's Savushun is a novel about the Iranian experience of modernity during the 20th century. Iranian writer and satirist, Bibi Khatoon Astarabadi was perhaps the first professional female satirist, critic and one of the notable figures involved in Persian constitutional revolution.

In early 20th century, Persian music enjoyed the emergence of Qamar ol-Molouk Vaziri, the "Lady of Iranian music".

Historical landmarks

Persian constitutional revolution

Persia had undergone a phenomenal constitutional revolution at the turn of the twentieth century. The constitutional movement was concerned with modernity and human rights. It led to the establishment of a parliament in Persia.

Iranian Revolution

Some researchers believe that the Iranian Revolution was not a simple clash between modernity and tradition but an attempt to accommodate modernity within a sense of authentic Islamic identity, culture and historical experience. [2] Perceived by many as a revolt against the secular modernity of the West, Iranian revolution was welcomed by some Western thinkers as a triumph of spiritual values over the profane world of capitalist materialism. For others the Iranian revolution was a protest against the very political rationality of the modern era. [3]

2nd of Khordad movement

see main article: 2nd of Khordad Movement

The election of President Mohammad Khatami in May 1997 was through the emergence of a new political force -- youth -- inspired by simultaneously individualist and democratic ideals that are incompatible in every respect with the authoritarian values and symbols traditionally associated in the Iranian intellectual arena with Marxist and Heideggerian World views. It is in this new social atmosphere that the emergence of a global community or a cyberpolis was able to reveal to the Iranian youth the true nature of instrumental rationality as modern universal standards. Saeed Hajjarian was widely believed to be the main strategist behind the 1997 reform movement of Iran. He allegedly showed the supremacy of politics as such over any religious norm when he said that the survival of the Islamic Republic was paramount and that no religious ritual should stand in its way. This kind of decision, he states, means that politics are more important than religion and that this acknowledges the secularization of religion. In this context, he argues, it is possible to reassess velayat faqih and to reject its supremacy within the political field in Iran. While calling to build a new reform movement, Hajjarian believes that the reform movement started in 1997, died during Khatami's second term. He believes that the reform project started by Persian constitutional revolution, has not been completed yet.

Intellectual circles in late 20th century

File:Roshanfekran e Iran.jpg

Some leading figures of Iranian literary intellectuals: (L to R) Morteza Keyvan, Ahmad Shamlou, Nima Yooshij, Siavash Kasraie, and Hushang Ebtehaj.

Intellectual circles in postrevolutionary Iran can be classified into the following categories:

Revolutionary intellectual circles

The main figures in this category are Ali Shariati, Jalal Al Ahmad and Morteza Motahhari. Ali Shariati was the main theorist and thinker behind Iranian revolution. He is considered to be one of the most influential philosophical leaders of pre-revolutionary Iran and the impact and popularity of his thought continues to be felt throughout Iranian society many years later. He died unexpectedly one year before the revolution.

Reformist intellectual circles

Main figures in this category are Mehdi Bazargan, Abdolkarim Soroush, Mohammad Mojtahed Shabestari, Mostafa Malekian, Ehsan Naraghi, Mohsen Kadivar, Alireza Alavitabar and Hossein Bashiriyeh.

The unifying traits of these intellectuals include their recognition of reform in the Islamic thought, democracy, civil society and religious pluralism and their opposition to the absolute supremacy of the Faqih. The rise of religious intellectuals can be followed through the writings of Abdolkarim Soroosh. Soroosh’s main idea is that there are perennial unchanging religious truths, but our understanding of them remains contingent on our knowledge in the fields of science and philosophy. Unlike Ali Shariati, who turned to Marxism to bring a historicist perspective to the Shiite thought, Soroosh debates the relation between democracy and religion and discusses the possibility of what he calls religious democracy.

Influenced by Persian mysticism, Soroush advocated a type of reformist Islam that went beyond most liberal Muslim thinkers of the 20th century and argued that the search for reconciliation of Islam and democracy was not a matter of simply finding appropriate phrases in the Qur'an that were in agreement with modern science, democracy, or human rights. Drawing on the works of Molana Jalaleddin Balkhi, Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Popper, and Erich Fromm, Soroush called for a reexamination of all tenets of Islam, insisting on the need to maintain the religion's original spirit of social justice and its emphasis on caring for other people.[4]

Other influential figures in these circles are Ali Paya, Saeed Hajjarian, Ahmad Sadri, Mahmoud Sadri, Ezzatollah Sahabi, Ahmad Ghabel and Hassan Yousefi Eshkevari. Akbar Ganji had also been associated with this circle before he published his Manifest of Republicanism. Moreover Akbar Ganji took a tour around the world in order to invite non Iranian intellectuals to join Iran's intellectual movement. Many Persian scholars believe that such interactions with world scholars would promote Iranian intellectualism and democratic reform. Richard Rorty, Noam Chomsky, Anthony Giddens, David Hild, Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt among a few others accepted the honorary membership of Iranian intellectual society.

Perhaps the most important achievement of this circle was training a new generation of Iranian intellectuals who are far ahead of their mentors and do not belong to any of well-established intellectual circles in Iran. Ahmad Zeidabadi and Mehdi Jami belong to this new generation of Persian scholars.

Democratic religious circles

File:Religion and modernity.jpg

International conference on religion and modernity (Tehran 2006)

These groups are characterized by the followings:

Support for Islamic republic as the best form of government
Calling for Religious tolerance
Calling for democratic values
Rejecting liberalism
Rejecting secularism
Calling for the rule of law and civil society
They believe that ethics has priority over politics.

The main thinker and theorist of this circle is Mohammad Khatami, former president of Iran. Other notable figures include Yousef Sanei, Abdollah Noori, Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mostafa Moin. They are mainly under the influence of ideas of Ayatollah Mirza Hossein Na'eeni and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Neo-conservative intellectual circles

Unlike the reformist intellectuals, the neo- conservative intellectuals in Iran are in favor of the supremacy of the Leader and against concepts such as democracy, civil society and pluralism. This movement includes figures such as Reza Davari Ardakani, Javad Larijani and Mehdi Golshani. The famous personality among these is Reza Davari Ardakani, who as an anti- Western philosopher is very familiar with the works of Martin Heidegger. Davari, unlike Soroosh, takes some of the features of Heidegger’s thought, mainly the critic of modernity and puts it into an Islamic wording. He rejects the Western model of democracy, which is based on the separation of politics and religion.

Non religious intellectual circles

Main figures in this category are Javad Tabatabaei, Dariush Shayegan, Amir Hossein Aryanpour, Ramin Jahanbegloo, Abbas Milani and Aramesh Doustdar.

Javad Tabtabaei deplores the deep roots of religion in the Iranian culture. For Tabatabai, the decline of the Iranian political thought goes back to the 9th and 10th centuries and, since then, it has been impossible for them to adequately understand the modernity. The social sciences, according to him, have been introduced in Iran without the secularization of thought and its rationalization and therefore, they reproduce in an unconscious way the ancient prejudices and the inability to think adequately.

File:Shahrokh Meskoob.jpg

Shahrokh Meskoob.

Dariush Shayegan criticizes a view of religion that does not take into account the major trends of the modern world where cultural homogeneity and religious absolutism are questioned. The quest for a holistic identity based on a monolithic view of Islam is alien to the evolution of modern world and means the isolation and regression of the (Iranian) society.

Dariush Shayegan, who writes mainly in French (but has been extensively translated into Persian), shares some of the views of these particular intellectuals, but his major contribution is to invite Iranians to accept the ‘‘fragmented identity’’ of the modern world and to renounce a unitary view of the Self which leads to a fascination with utopian and mythological ideologies. He insists that, since Iran has undergone the change directly from tradition to postmodernity without the mediation of modernity, it is experiencing a strong malaise. His solution is to open up Iran to the new multicultural world in which one has to accept the diversity of the perspectives and, therefore, to be tolerant towards others who do not think and behave in the same way as the Self. This invitation to become open-minded and to give up the idea of a homogeneous culture exerts an undeniable influence on many young people in Iran.

Traditional scholars

The most notable circle was associated with Hossein Nasr, founder of Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy. For Nasr, the traditional world was pervaded by a tremendous sense of the Sacred and the Absolute, whereas the inception of modernity involved precisely the severing off of that awareness, resulting in what Max Weber would later dub the disenchantment of the world. Nasr has been an unrelenting opponent of Islamic fundamentalism in all its forms throughout his career because he sees it as a somewhat vigilante reactionary movement operating within the paradigm of the modern nation state, but even more so, because it lacks a well thought out metaphysical basis rooted in a traditional Muslim understanding of the world which respects both nature and human dignity.

Other notable figures

There are several intellectual figures who continue to be very influential in Iranian society, while they do not belong to any of the above mentioned philosophical circles:

Daryoush Ashouri (prominent scholar, linguist and cultural theorist)
Masoud Behnoud (prominent journalist and writer)
Khosrow Naghed (prominent expert on Iranian culture and philosophy)
Hamid Dabashi (prominent expert on contemporary Iran, Iranian art and cinema)
Hossein Elahi Ghomshei (prominent expert on Iranian mysthical thoughts)
Mousa Ghaninejad (senior Iranian economist)

Philosophy education in Iran

Philosophy has become a popular subject of study during last few decades in Iran. Comparing the number of philosophy books currently published in Iran with that in other countries, Iran possibly ranks first in this field but it is definitely on top in terms of publishing philosophy books. [5]

References

^ Patrick Clawson and Michael Rubin. Eternal Iran. Palgrave Macmillan. 2005. ISBN 1-4039-6276-6 p.34

Abbas Milani, Lost Wisdom: Rethinking Modernity in Iran, Mage Publishers, (2004). ISBN 0-934211-90-6.
The fourth generation of Iranian intellectuals, Ramin Jahanbegloo, (2000). [6]
Secularism, national identity, and the role of the intellectual, by Ramin Jahanbegloo, (2005). [7]
Ramin Jahanbegloo, Iranian intellectuals: from revolution to dissent. [8]
Farhad Khosrokhavar, The New Intellectuals in Iran, Social Compass, Vol. 51, No. 2, 191-202 (2004)
Afshin Matin-asgari, Iranian postmodernity: the rhetoric of irrationality?, Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies, Volume 13, Number 1 / Spring (2004).
Gheissari, Ali. Iranian Intellectuals in the 20th Century. Austin University of Texas Press, 1998.

External links

[1] Patrick Clawson and Michael Rubin. Eternal Iran. Palgrave Macmillan. 2005. ISBN 1-4039-6276-6 p.34

[1]

@@ Line 55: / Line 55: @@
 ''See main article [[Persian literature]]''
-Literary criticism and comparative literature in Iran entered a new phase in 19th century. [[Persian literature]] enjoyed the emergence of influential figures as [[Sadeq Hedayat]], [[Ahmad Kasravi]], [[Abdolhossein Zarrinkoub]], [[Shahrokh Meskoob]], [[Ebrahim Golestan]] and [[Sadegh Choubak]].
+Literary criticism and comparative literature in Iran entered a new phase in 19th century. [[Persian literature]] enjoyed the emergence of influential figures as [[Sadegh Hedayat]], [[Ahmad Kasravi]], [[Abdolhossein Zarrinkoub]], [[Shahrokh Meskoob]], [[Ebrahim Golestan]] and [[Sadegh Choubak]].
 ==Modern scientific movement ==