“Protestant” Defiance of Clerical Authority and the Intellectual Project of Progressive Islam

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This presentation will probe whether, despite past failures, a convergence between democratic socialism and progressive interpretations of Islam might be possible in Iran. I will trace pivotal moments of encounters between these two trends to identify a major impediment to their convergence. The main obstacle to democratic socialist readings of Islam, I conclude, is the clerical establishment’s monopoly of interpreting religion, a historically-entrenched roadblock whose removal would amount to a “Protestant” reformation of Shi’i Islam. (A similar intellectual reconstruction is needed to salvage the idea of socialism from the deadweight of ossified orthodoxies and failed historical experiments.) 

 

The “blockage” between socialism and modernizing Islam emerged in their first encounter a clear and principled stance toward Islam and clerical authority. Facing fierce clerical pushback against their social democratic agenda, figures like Dehkhoda and Taqizadeh resorted to the Shi’i practice of taqieh, (falsely) claiming that socialism was fully compatible with “true Islam.” I argue that an intellectually honest, and in the long run more constructive, approach would have been to admit that socialism stood in contrast to the historical reality of organized religion, invariably sustained by official clerical authority. Following this approach, socialists could have aligned themselves strategically with secularist and Muslim reformers seeking to “purify” Islam from superstition, corruption and clerical abuse. Although this strategic alliance did materialize to some extent, neither the socialists, and later communists, nor Muslim reformers dared to directly challenge organized religion and clerical authority. A century later, precisely this kind of “Islamic Protestantism” has become imperative in Iran, where the clerics have turned their intellectual authority into a stranglehold on political power. The rejection of velayat-e faqih, as a political doctrine, I argue, must be linked to the freedom of conscience, i.e., the rejection of compulsory taqlid.  All individuals must be able to choose their beliefs without external compulsion, in line with the cardinal Enlightenment dictum of “daring to think for oneself.” Muslims and secularists can then agree that Islam, like other religions, can become what believers choose to make of it, and hence potentially compatible with divergent politics and ideologies, ranging from socialism to fascism.

 

Recognizing the necessity of Islamic “Protestantism” does not make its accomplishment an easy task. We must note, however, that both secularists and modernizing Muslims have been intellectually defying the clergy’s prerogatives for more than a century. The clerical establishment’s rigid and violent upholding of official religion has forced its radical critics to break with Islam, as in the case of Babis and Baha’is, or proto-“Protestant” reformers like Kasravi.  Taking a different route, the God-Worshiping Socialists, or the early Mojahedin Organization, imagined their radical reinterpretation of Shi’ism could circumvent the clerical establishment. Twentieth-century Iran’s most influential Muslim socialist, Shariati, faced violent clerical censure due to his “Protestantism,” while his twenty-first century followers, like Aqajari, have faced the death penalty precisely because of the same accusation. Presently, the Islamic Republic’s deepening legitimacy crisis is forcing the open defiance of clerical authority on both secularist and Muslim reforms.  (Avoiding this question is the reason why the regime’s reformist camp is increasingly irrelevant.) Whether secularists or believers, however, we must take this challenge beyond political expediency and intellectually prepare the grounds for the emergence of a progressive Islam free from the shackles historically imposed by its official custodians.