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
Siavash Saffari is an assistant professor of West Asian Studies at Seoul National University. He received a Ph.D. in Political Science and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies from the University of Alberta, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. His research and teaching interests include: Middle Eastern and Islamic politics; modern Islamic political and philosophical thought; comparative political theory; modern Iranian social and intellectual history; modernity/coloniality/decoloniality; and development/post-development. His academic publications have appeared in such journals as Sociology of Islam; Middle East Critique; Contemporary Islam; Journal of Humanities; Review of Radical Political Economics; and Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. His first monograph, Beyond Shariati: Modernity, Cosmopolitanism and Islam in Iranian Political Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2017), received the Best First Book Award from the American Political Science Association’s Foundations of Political Theory Section.
Public Religiosity and Emancipatory Politics: Toward an Islamic Intersectional Theology
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That religion, in its myriad of forms and manifestations, remains a key component of collective identity and public life in the modern world is hardly a controversial proposition. In Muslim-majority societies (not unlike other societies), example of this are abound. Following the 2011 revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, Islamist parties emerged as the winners of the first post-revolutionary electoral contests. In Turkey, after nearly a century of Kemalist secularism, political Islam appears robust and unyielding both in the Erdoganist state and in the Gulenist opposition. And Iran is now entering its fifth decade under the Islamist state. At the same time, in these and other Muslim-majority societies, historical and ongoing struggles against colonialism and imperialism, capitalism, theocratic as well as secular authoritarianism, racism, patriarchy and heteronormativity, and environmental destruction – what Patricia Hill Collins calls “the matrix of oppression” – have led to the development of a medley of anti-colonial, anti-capitalist, democratic, anti-racist, feminist, queer-friendly, and environmentally conscious interpretations of Islam. It is within this context, then, that we are asked in this symposium to consider the relation between civic spirituality and emancipatory politics (i.e. democracy, socialism, and justice). There are, to be sure, some proponents of emancipatory politics who continue to hold firm to Karl Marx’s assertion that genuine emancipation from oppressive and exploitative relations requires “the abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people.” On the other hand, and increasingly so in recent times, even some of the secular exponents of progressive politics have come to acknowledge the mobilizational capacities as well as the “untapped moral intuitions” (in Jürgen Habermas’s words) of public religiosity for unsettling the matrix of oppression. This paper begins by identifying Islamic liberation theology as a religious-political movement that is compatible with democratic, socialist, and justice-oriented visions of emancipation. Some of the leading figures of Islamic liberation theology (i.e. Mahmoud Mohammed Taha, Ali Shariati, Amina Wadud, Asma Barlas, and Farid Esack) will be introduced, and their collective discourse will be distinguished from other major Islamic-political movements, such as Islamism and Islamic liberalism. Through a dialogical reading of Islamic liberation theology and theories of intersectionality (as articulated by leading black feminists such as Patricia Hill Collins, Audre Lorde, and bell hook), the paper then argues for a move from liberation theology to intersectional theology as a necessary development in emancipatory civic spirituality. This move, the paper contends, is not only needed to reflect our new understandings of the intersectionality of oppression and emancipation; it will also facilitate meaningful dialogue and cooperation between religious and secular agents of emancipatory projects.
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