Behrouz Ghamari-Tabrizi
Professor of Near Eastern Studies and Director of the Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies at Princeton University
Behrouz Ghamari-Tabrizi
Professor of Near Eastern Studies and Director of the Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies at Princeton University
Arash Davari is assistant professor of Politics at Whitman College. His research and teaching interests include modern and contemporary political theory; history and theory; aesthetics and politics; postcolonial political theory; and state formation and social change in the Middle East, with a focus on modern Iran. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Muslim Democracy as Realistic Utopia: Reading Ali Shariati’s Ummat va Imāmat in a Bandung Spirit
This chapter presents an alternate reading of one of Ali Shariati’s most controversial texts, 1968’s Ummat va Imāmat [The Muslim Community and Shia Leadership]. Since the event of the 1979 revolution in Iran, Ummat va Imāmat has either been wielded as a weapon for state legitimation or been the subject of trenchant critique labeling Shariati a progenitor of autocratic tendencies in the Islamic Republic. Readings of the text in English, French, and Persian-language scholarship are equally mired in a national historiography overdetermined by the outcome of the 1979 revolution. Critics have too readily taken the text’s references to the 1955 Bandung conference as an affirmation of authoritarian leadership, sectarianism, state-centered legalism, and illiberalism. Even sympathetic readings strive to distance these aspects of Shariati’s corpus from the broader ethos animating his ideas. For one, Ummat va Imāmat is damning evidence of complicity in historical errors; for the other, it is an unfortunate, and unrepresentative, outlier. Recent interventions in the historiography of modern Iran, reimagining the spatial and temporal qualities of the 1979 revolution, invite reading the text otherwise. Spatially, they encourage historians to adopt a global perspective; temporally, they emphasize a non-teleological reading of the event as lived experience, disassociating modes of revolutionary mobilization from post-revolutionary outcomes. In this vein, centering Shariati’s references to the May 68 uprisings in France––and his ensuing and infamously mischievous references to the authority of a fictive French professor by the name of “Chandelle” throughout––I argue that Ummat va Imāmat favors an imagined “Bandung Spirit” rich in democratic potential both for and from the Third World. Along the way, Shariati re-signifies facets of canonical European political thought concerning democracy, social justice, and utopia. It is only right that we too re-signify the text most often taken to signal his worst tendencies. In so doing, I suggest, Shariati emerges as a thinker for democracy, social justice, and realistically utopian possibilities far beyond Iran’s nation-state borders.