Introduction
Some scholars of modern Iranian studies have identified the Left’s failure to articulate a systemic criticism of religion as a leading cause of an ostensibly broader leftist failure in late twentieth century Iran.Footnote 1 The aim of this article is not to counter this hypothesis, rather to propose that alongside the current within the secular Left which may be said to have taken an uncritical, accommodationist, or optimistic stance on religion, there existed, throughout the twentieth century, another, perhaps minority, current within the secular Left with a markedly skeptical take on religion and its presence in public life. Two leading representatives of the latter current are Taqi Erāni and Bizhan Jazani, whose criticisms of religion are discussed here. Another key figure, a pioneer in this effort, is the famed constitutionalist politician and journalist Mammad Amin Rasulzade (1884–1955), who argued the religious promise of an afterlife was a mere ploy to divert the attention of the masses away from the material realities of life.Footnote 2 Charging the clergy with using religion “to stupefy the masses on behalf of the ruling class,” Rasūlzādeh urged socialists everywhere to “oppose the clerical class” and demand “the separation of religion and politics.”Footnote 3
More than Rasūlzādeh, however, it was Erāni who, through his 1930s essays in Dunyā, introduced Iran’s educated elites to a Marxian critique of religion. When the communist Tūdeh Party was established in 1941, many among the party’s first generation, perhaps under Erāni’s influence, maintained a more-or-less skeptical attitude toward religion.Footnote 4 Sādeq Hedāyata and Sādeq Chūbak were among this period’s leading literati with Tūdeh links who cultivated conspicuously anti-religious and anti-Islamic themes in their writings.Footnote 5 Still, owing to factors the examination of which requires a separate study, the Tūdeh Party gradually moved away from its initial critical–skeptical leaning, taking an increasingly more sympathetic–accommodationist tone toward Islam and the Shi’i clerical establishment. In an evident departure from Erāni’s position, Ehsān Tabari, in a 1967 book which incidentally opens with an impassioned dedication to Erāni, lauded Islam’s emancipatory potential and called for “social and political collaboration” between Iranian Marxists and the Shi’i clergy.Footnote 6 Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, it was a Tūdeh Party defector, Bizhan Jazani, who most forcefully advanced the critical–skeptical secular leftist discourse on religion and who warned the Left against joining forces with the clergy.
Through a comparative reading of Erāni’s and Jazani’s texts, this article draws attention to the development of a broadly Marxian critique of religion in twentieth century Iranian political thought. It argues that Erāni and Jazani, following Marx and Marxian dialectical materialism, understand religion to be a superstructural relic from an earlier stage of human development that withdraws from collective human life with the forward movement of history. It also shows that in Erāni’s and Jazani’s shared Marxian frame, a religious worldview sits antithetically to the ostensibly more sophisticated, scientific, and emancipatory worldview of dialectical materialism. The latter is understood by Erāni and Jazani to be the philosophical foundation of Marxism and an epistemological frame within which to scientifically study and predict the movement of history. In constructing their own narratives of history’s dialectical movement, both men assume, problematically as the article later discusses, a necessary correlation between the expansion of industrialization and the social decline of religion. Assured that industrial capitalism in Iran has set religion on an irreversible course of withdrawal from public life, Erāni and Jazani negatively assess any attempt to reform and modernize religion or to bring religion into social and political struggles.
Taqi Erāni: Dialectics of Secularization à la Marx and Engels
Born in Tabriz in 1902, Taqi Erāni spent most of his early years in Tehran with his maternal family.Footnote 7 His grandfather and great-grandfather had both studied Islamic fiqh and were considered to be mujtahids.Footnote 8 Having himself received an Islamic education as a young pupil, Erāni entered Dār al-Funūn in 1914, and Tehran’s Medical College in 1920. Two years later, leaving with his medical studies unfinished, he arrived in Berlin, where he studied chemistry at the Technical University and earned his doctorate degree in 1928.Footnote 9 In Germany, Erāni initially gravitated toward Persian-centric nationalism and wrote “hyper-nationalistic articles” in two influential Berlin-based periodicals, Irānshahr and Nāme-ye Farangestān.Footnote 10 In these articles he took a sympathetic position toward pre-Islamic Persian religions,Footnote 11 once asserting that the revival of Zoroastrianism may save Iran “from backwardness and imperialism.”Footnote 12 His hyper-nationalist phase proved to be short-lived; in Berlin’s dynamic intellectual and political milieu, Erāni was soon drawn to European socialism and immersed himself in the works of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Karl Kautsky, and Vladimir Lenin.Footnote 13 By 1926, he had joined a small group of Iranian Marxists in Berlin known as the Revolutionary Republican Party of Iran.Footnote 14
Having returned to Tehran in 1930, Erāni took up a teaching position at the College of Technology while also leading a secret study group comprised of “educated intellectuals who had converted to Marxism.”Footnote 15 It was with the help of some of these same individuals that in 1934 he launched a monthly magazine. In November of the previous year, Erāni had requested a publication permit from the Ministry of Culture for a prospective magazine to be called Materialism.Footnote 16 When the Ministry declined his request citing a bylaw banning the use of “European” words in the title, Erāni and his associates chose Dunyā (The World), a title borrowed “from Le Monde— the paper edited by Henri Barbusse, the famous French communist.”Footnote 17 Dunyā’s highbrow language was not meant for lay audiences; still, the magazine’s introduction of Marxian dialectical materialism marked an important moment in the history of the Left in Iran. Where mere mention of Marxism or communism could have been grounds for censorship and imprisonment, the seemingly benign and ostensibly scientific language of dialectical materialism was indeed a Trojan horse for Marxist analysis.Footnote 18 Be that as it may, Dunyā’s publication, which was perpetually interrupted by financial difficulties, eventually came to an end in May 1935.Footnote 19 Exactly two years later, Erāni, was among a loosely connected group of fifty-three leftist intellectuals and activists who were arrested and tried on charges including membership in an illicit communist organization and “translating such ‘atheistic tracts’ as Marx’s Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto.”Footnote 20 Sentenced by the court to ten years of solitary confinement, Erāni died in prison on 4 February 1940.
Though he and his friends managed only to publish twelve issues of the magazine, Erāni’s essays in Dunyā played a key role in introducing Iranians to the theoretical foundations of Marxism and to some of the then ongoing debates in European socialist circles. In particular, Erāni used the terminology of dialectical materialism to evoke what European Marxists at the time called scientific socialism, distinguished from an ostensibly utopian and unscientific variety of socialism. The former was exemplified by Marx and Engels, while the latter was used in reference to Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, and Étienne Cabet, among others. That Erāni was aware of these debates and sided with the former group is evidenced by a distinction he makes between scientific and unscientific dialectics, designating the former as the highest form of human understanding.Footnote 21 A similar conclusion is reached by Shahibzadeh, who observes that Erani’s conception of dialectical materialism relies on a series of works by Engels wherein he presented dialectical materialism as a scientific methodology for understanding the progressive movement of history.Footnote 22
His siding with Marx and Engels notwithstanding, Erāni’s critique of religion also bears the unmistakable influence of the Young Hegelians, particularly of Ludwig Feuerbach. In his 1841 book, The Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach described religious faith as “the childlike condition of humanity”; a primitive form of “self-knowledge” that “everywhere precedes philosophy.”Footnote 23 In his assessment, as a form of false consciousness, religion “inverts the natural order of things.” Whereas historically “Man…created God in his own image,” religion reverses this order, thus making “the secondary primitive, and the primitive secondary.”Footnote 24 It has been noted that in some of his earlier writings, Marx too was under the influence of Feuerbach’s critique of religion.Footnote 25 In his 1843 A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx famously described religion as “the opium of the people,” positing that genuine human emancipation required, among other conditions, “the abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people.”Footnote 26 Soon thereafter, however, he parted ways with the Young Hegelians, shifting his attention from the critique of the essence of religion to the critique of the concrete social relations that give content to religiosity.Footnote 27 In his 1845 Theses on Feuerbach, Marx argued that Feuerbach failed to see “that the ‘religious sentiment’ is itself a social product,” and this neglect compelled Feuerbach “to abstract from the historical process and to fix the religious sentiment as something by itself and to presuppose an abstract— isolated— human individual.”Footnote 28
Following Feuerbach and the young Marx, Erāni regards religious understanding to be a primitive and distorted form of self-consciousness, and a remnant of the infancy stage of human evolution.Footnote 29 In Erāni’s hierarchical epistemology, “ideas are first expressed as mythology, then religion, then philosophy, and finally as rational scientific principles.”Footnote 30 Echoing Feuerbach’s paralleling of individual and social development, Erāni posits that resorting to primitive forms of understanding such as mythology and religion is but a natural function of “a childlike human condition.”Footnote 31 It is just as natural then that as “human society” moves from infancy to maturity, metaphysical, mythological, and religious beliefs are gradually replaced with scientific truths.Footnote 32 Also echoing Feuerbach and the young Marx, Erāni posits that religion’s false sense of security cripples human agency and “keeps the masses content with the status quo.”Footnote 33 Like the young Marx, he believes that human emancipation is intrinsically tied to emancipation from religiously induced false consciousness. In order for human societies to progress, Erāni declares, they ought to toss out “fantasies about commanding entities up in the skies.”Footnote 34
Still, acknowledging Marx’s later critique, Erāni asserts that despite his “thoroughly materialist thoughts,” Feuerbach’s neglect of dialectical reason led him to err on a number of matters. Marx, Erāni speculates, wrote his Theses on Feuerbach (1845) and The Poverty of Philosophy (1847) precisely in order to bring materialism back into its appropriate dialectical framework.Footnote 35 As “the most evolved form of reasoning,” Erāni proclaims, “dialectical reasoning” rejects previous philosophical approaches in which concepts and phenomena have a “fixed essence.” Instead, “dialectical reasoning regards all concepts as existing in dynamic interactions with other natural components.”Footnote 36 Erāni goes on to argue that dialectical materialism and its epistemological and ontological foundations are based on the solid grounds of material life itself. “For materialists,” he explains, “there is no outside world other than the material world in which we live.” Yet materialism is itself manifested in two broad varieties: metaphysical and dialectical. Whereas metaphysical materialists “believe in a mechanical and wholly material world,” dialectical materialists “believe in a dynamic and ever-changing material world in which all elements mutually impact one another.”Footnote 37 Following the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels, Erāni argues that a dialectical relationship exists between the base and the superstructure. As part of the superstructure, religion exists in a dialectical relationship with the material economic base; its doctrinal contents and ritualistic practices reflect the prevailing material relations, and any change in the latter has a corresponding impact on religious doctrines and rituals.Footnote 38
Nevertheless, Erāni insists, as material phenomena all religions share a number of essential features. Firstly, religions belong to a primitive age of human evolution and they impart to the faithful a distorted self-consciousness. Secondly, religions provide believers with a shared doctrinal system reinforced by a series of rituals administered by a clerical order. Thirdly, though the content of religion changes constantly in a dialectical relationship with the economic base, “religious adherents and leaders consider it to be unchanging, eternally valid, and of a solid essence.”Footnote 39 Noting that differences in historical contexts and material dynamics inevitably produce differences between and within religions, Erāni distinguishes between two broad categories of religions: mystical (‘erfāni) and temporal (māddi). The former group of religions emerge in times of defeat and despair, legitimize the status quo, and advocate pacifism in the face of grim conditions.Footnote 40 Examples of such religions are Buddhism, Taoism, Mithraism, and Christianity.Footnote 41 Of Buddhism, for instance, Erāni says that its rise was a reaction to the corruption of the Brahmin class and the desperation of subordinate classes; the religion’s aim, however, was not to change the material conditions but rather to “shun the material world” and to “suppress the desire for bodily pleasures.”Footnote 42 Likewise, in the context of the slave-based Roman economy, “Christianity’s promise of justice in the afterlife…as compensation for worldly sufferings appealed to slaves who had lost all hope.”Footnote 43
Temporal religions, on the other hand, are those whose objective at inception is to alter the prevailing material conditions. Examples of these include Zoroastrianism, Mazdakism, and Islam. Erāni believes the anti-status quo disposition of temporal religions may offer some progressive potential in the particular contexts of their inception. However, he then postulates, since religious dogma is at its core incompatible with the principles of dialectical materialism, with time even temporal religions lose their materialist predisposition and take on the qualities of mystical religions. Thus, “even though Zoroastrianism was initially devoid of mystical elements, with time this religion too changed.”Footnote 44 Having exhausted its progressive potential, Zoroastrianism was fully coopted by the Sassanid court and in its stead a number of mystical faiths such as Mithraism and Manichaeism began to attract followers.Footnote 45 Similarly, while Islam was originally conceived as a thoroughly temporal religion, the rise of the Umayyad dynasty with its proclivity toward luxury and endless wars saw the parallel rise of various mystical movement in territories under Muslim rule. What is more, with the medieval-era translations into Arabic of ancient Greek philosophical works, Muslims came under the influence of Greek idealism, thus moving even further away from Islam’s original materialism.Footnote 46 Erāni hypothesizes that by the Abbasid period Islam had become a predominantly mystical religion, concluding that “unlike early Muslims who had a progressive function, Abbasid Muslims were agents of backwardness.”Footnote 47
Though he faults all manner of religious faith with cultivating a distorted consciousness, Erāni’s critique is above all aimed at mystical religiosity, which he accuses of encouraging pacifism and sidetracking oppressed populations with irrational fantasies.Footnote 48 As Mirsepassi points out, Erāni regards mysticism as a major impediment “to achieving a modern and vital Iranian society.”Footnote 49 In an article in Dunyā, he forthrightly declares his intention: “to call on the masses to avoid the malaises of dervish-like life, and of contentment, seclusion, opiates, and the craze of claiming deity…, and to invite them to attend to material life and the struggle for survival.”Footnote 50 Erāni argues while the history of mysticism in Iran predates the advent of Islam, under Umayyad and Abbasid rule mystical beliefs found fertile ground in Iran, as well as in other newly captured territories, “especially among those classes who desired freedom from the rule of the Caliph but lacked the capacity to take action.”Footnote 51 Following the Mongolian invasion, Sufism, whose prominent articulators at the time included Farid al-Din ‘Attar and Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi, found even wider appeal.Footnote 52 The mystical legacy of these literary figures were carried forth by subsequent Persian poets such as Hafez and Sa’di.Footnote 53 The gradual arrival of Shi’ism in Iran served only to strengthen Sufi mysticism. Though born out of struggles in the non-Arab periphery to gain autonomy from the caliphate’s Arab center, Shi’ism too soon became a mystical sect,Footnote 54 and subsequently “a tool in the hands of Iranian rulers.”Footnote 55
Like the young Marx and his Young Hegelian contemporaries, Erāni is convinced that criticism of religion is an essential step on the path toward human emancipation. With just as much rigor, he is also reassured that the disappearance of religion is an inevitable step in human evolution;Footnote 56 as a primitive form of self-knowledge, religion evolves in a dialectical relationship with the material base until eventually religious beliefs are wholly replaced with scientific truths. For Erāni, the final manifestation of religion before its inescapable demise is “reformed religiosity.” In Europe, Martin Luther’s religious reformation facilitated the transition from the age of religion into the age of scientific enlightenment. Similarly, in Iran and surrounding regions the rise on the one hand of new religious movements such as Babism, Bahaism, and Ahmadiyya, and on the other hand of “a political revolution whose seeds were sown by Mirzā Āqā Khān-e Kermāni and Sayyid Jamāl ad-Din al-Afghāni,” signal a shift toward reformed religiosity.Footnote 57 Yet neither in Europe nor in Iran will reformed religion survive the forward march of history; with the arrival of industrial capitalism, “even reformed religion loses its social importance and will give place to free scientific beliefs.”Footnote 58 In the meanwhile, Erāni is deeply skeptical about the progressive potential of even reformed religion, particularly at a point in history when dialectical materialism and scientific socialism represent the peak of human knowledge.Footnote 59 He suspects the use of religion to mobilize support even for progressive struggles may inversely produce regressive consequences. Hence the use of traditional Hindu teachings by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and his followers is regarded by Erāni as having served only to impair India’s anticolonial movement; Gandhi, according to Erāni, is “an element of backwardness and regression,” who promotes “resistance without action” and “a mystical disengagement from material life.”Footnote 60
Bizhan Jazani: Turn to Local History, Critique of Reformed Religion
When Bizhan Jazani was born in 1937, Erāni had already begun serving his prison sentence. Having grown up in Tehran in a pro-Tūdeh Party family, Jazani himself joined the Tūdeh Youth Organization at an early age and remained involved with the party until the 1953 coup d’état.Footnote 61 In the post-coup environment and having “become disillusioned with the Tūdeh Party,” Jazani first joined the Second National Front, and subsequently in March 1963 he, along with three others, founded a clandestine Marxist group. In 1966, Jazani’s group merged with another group that had been formed independently under the leadership of a young Marxist lawyer named Hasan Ziā-Zarifi.Footnote 62 Two years later, Jazani was arrested and charged with “membership in an illegal Marxist organization and conspiracy to overthrow the Pahlavi regime,” receiving a fifteen-year prison sentence.Footnote 63 In 1971, the remnants of the so-called Jazani–Zarifi Group united with a like-minded group founded by Mas'ūd Ahmadzādeh and Amir-Parviz Pūyān, forming the Organization of Iranian People’s Fadā'i Guerrillas (OIPFG).Footnote 64 In prison, Jazani wrote several books and essays and managed to have them smuggled out into the hands of his OIPFG comrades. Still, with Jazani in prison, it was Ahmadzādeh who came to be seen as the OIPFG’s chief theoretician. One year after his sudden execution in 1975, Jazani’s theses were accepted and adopted by the OIPFG.Footnote 65
Jazani entered political life at a time of renewed interest in the relationship between religion and revolution, Islam and socialism. By the mid-1960s, Islamic socialism, whose earlier proponents in Iran had included al-Afghāni and Muhammad Nakhshab,Footnote 66 had found new high-profile advocates in Ali Shari’ati and the Organization of the People’s Mujāhedin of Iran (OPMI).Footnote 67 When, in the early 1970s, some OPMI members moved away from their original Islamic-Marxist ideology and gravitated instead toward Marxism–Leninism, the debate over the relationship between Islam and socialism became ever fiercer. Among the key participants in this debate was Jazani, whose Islamic Marxism or Marxist Islam, written in 1973 but published posthumously, is described by Abrahamian as “one of the first systematic analyses of Islam to be done by an Iranian Marxist.”Footnote 68 Noting Jazani’s criticism of modernist and reformist interpretations of Islam, Haideh Moghissi argues that Jazani saw as futile any efforts to reconcile Islam with “progressive ideas,” and instead called on Iranian Marxists “to educated the masses about the true nature of religion.”Footnote 69 Afshin Matin-Asgari too takes note of Jazani’s unique contribution, suggesting that Jazani’s radical criticism of religion represents a departure from the entrenched view among Iranian Marxists that religion may be used as an instrument to mobilize the masses.Footnote 70
In light of the previous section, it is proposed that Jazani’s criticism of Islam and reformist religion is less of a total break from leftist theorizations on religion than it is a return to a critical–skeptical secular leftist outlook on religion whose earlier exemplars include Rasūlzādeh and Erāni. Overlaps, particularly with the latter, are abundant. Like Erāni, Jazani believes religions belong to a lower phase of human evolution and are heir to earlier forms of “nonsense and superstition.” “The idea of religion,” Jazani writes, “was born in primitive times…to console weak and unsophisticated humans who were trying to overcome the forces of nature.”Footnote 71 Jazani also shares Erāni’s view about the inherent incompatibility of Islamic-Shi’i beliefs with the principles of dialectical materialism, because, he contends, however interpreted, traditional or modern, Islam’s doctrinal belief in “a non-material being” is wholly at odds with the very “first principle of dialectical materialism,” namely that “all being is made entirely of matter in its infinite forms.”Footnote 72 Jazani further echoes Erāni’s conviction that secularization is the historically inevitable fate of all societies.Footnote 73 However, while Erāni only marginally notes a shift in nineteenth and twentieth century Iran from traditional to reformed religion, Jazani turns his attention precisely to reformed religion and its role in sociopolitical and socioeconomic transformations in modern Iran. A student of philosophy and social history, Jazani offers a detailed dialectical materialist account of the changing roles and the overall declining presence of Islam in public life ever since Iran’s incorporation into global capitalism. Religious modernization projects, he opines, are efforts to adjust Islam to the precarious material conditions of Iran’s national bourgeoisie.Footnote 74 He then turns his attention to two representatives of these projects: the anticolonial clergy and the religious Marxists.
Jazani holds that under the feudal order, the Shi’i clerical class was fully integrated into the ruling regime. Aside from their near monopoly in the realms of law and education, the clergy was also responsible for certifying property ownership and supervising non-transferred properties; roles that brought the clerical establishment into a de facto alliance with the landowning class.Footnote 75 A series of modernizing reforms in the late nineteenth century, however, restrained clerical authority and strained the relationship between the court and the clergy while inadvertently boosting the alliance between the clergy and the merchant class.Footnote 76 In the 1891 tobacco protests and the 1905–11 Constitutional Revolution a segment of the clergy emerged as the leading force in popular mobilizations against domestic monarchical tyranny and colonial–imperial interference.Footnote 77 For Jazani, the anti-monarchical and anticolonial posturing of this segment of the clergy does not suggest that either Islam or Shi’ism are inherently opposed to oppressive relations. Instead, he focuses on the material causes that have brought the clergy into anti-monarchical and anticolonial struggles. According to him, when the national bourgeoisie came to clash with feudalism, segments of the clergy sided with “the comprador feudal state” while another segment “sided with the expanding bourgeoisie class and fought on its behalf against colonialism and monarchy.”Footnote 78
Though he distinguishes between “reactionary” and “progressive anticolonial” clerical factions, Jazani nevertheless argues that whenever its class interests are endangered the Shi’i clergy forms a united front to counter the perceived threat.Footnote 79 One such instance is the period following the 1962 land reforms. According to Jazani, even those clerics who had previously sided with the bourgeoisie watched the abolition of the feudal order with horror. They recognized that the abrogation of feudalism would set in motion a litany of other changes leading only to the further erosion of the clergy’s social functions and privileges. Still, cognizant of support for the policy among the peasant population, the clergy opted not to publicize its opposition to the land reforms. Instead, clerical opponents challenged the social and political components of the state’s reform package, including the granting of the right to vote to women.Footnote 80 Given the widespread underlying anti-state sentiments, clerical opposition soon found popular support.Footnote 81 Led by Ruhollāh Khomeini and backed by the petite bourgeoisie, progressive clergy emerged once again as the leading force in sociopolitical struggles. Jazani notes Khomeini’s rise from obscurity to national prominence in the 1963 demonstrations and his refusal to remain silent “even when the clerical establishment finally submitted under pressure.”Footnote 82 Still, writing in prison in winter 1973, Jazani postulates that while he enjoys “unprecedented popularity among the masses particularly among the petite bourgeois merchant class,” Khomeini and his clerical allies lack the capacity to lead a revolutionary uprising. This is so because (i) “the present condition of state suppression does not allow the resumption of political activities,” (ii) “the bazar merchants lack the capacity to take revolutionary action against the military dictatorship,” and (iii) “the clerical class has taken a defensive posture and has submitted to the authority of the state.”Footnote 83
As a Marxist–Leninist, Jazani of course wants the revolution to be led by the vanguard of the working class. He recognizes, however, that given their particular—colonially facilitated—modes of entry into global capitalism, in Iran and other Middle Eastern countries revolutionary movements are often led not by the proletariat but by the “radical petite bourgeoisie,” whose ideology, according to Jazani, is a synthesis of nationalism, religion, philosophical idealism, socialism, and liberal-democratic tendencies. This eclectic ideology enables the petite bourgeoisie to appeal to the workers in the course of its jockeying for the leadership of the revolutionary movement.Footnote 84 Still, Jazani is cautiously optimistic about the prospects of a genuine workers’ revolution. For one thing, the experiences of socialist revolutions in South East Asia and Latin America show the effectiveness of a strong “working class vanguard” who aptly understands and adequately applies “the ideology of the working class,” namely Marxism–Leninism.Footnote 85 Jazani thus urges his fellow Iranian Marxist–Leninists “to rise to the occasion and to take up the historic mantle of serving as the vanguard of the working class.” Otherwise, he warns, “the radical petite bourgeoisie” is waiting in the wings and ready to seize leadership by using all of its resources, and, if necessary, through a selective appropriation of the superior ideology of the working class.Footnote 86
Jazani further proposes that material changes in Iran are moving in the direction of the declining influence of religion and the growing influence of the ideology of the working class.Footnote 87 He argues that since the 1950s, with the “growth of dependent capitalism, decline of feudalism, expansion of urban civilization, increased influence of the Western civilization, and rapid expansion of educational opportunities,” patterns of religiosity have “declined significantly not only in cities but also in rural areas.”Footnote 88 Elsewhere he posits that with the expansion of dependent capitalism Iran’s working class has also expanded, while the national bourgeoisie has shrunk. Revolutionary forces ought then to focus their efforts on mobilizing, not the shrinking bourgeoisie sector, but the expanding working class.Footnote 89 Still, he cautiously comments that despite the declining role of religion and diminishing clerical resources, the Iranian working class is yet to succeed in positioning itself as the leader of the revolutionary movement. Without revolutionary experience, adequate proletariat class culture, and the capacity to mobilize and lead, Jazani laments, an increase in the size of the workforce does not necessarily help to secure the hegemony of the working class.Footnote 90
In Islamic Marxism or Marxist Islam, Jazani criticizes the OPMI and other religious Marxists for their use of “religious tactics,” by which he means “appealing to and amplifying the religious feelings and beliefs of the masses.”Footnote 91 His criticisms fall within one of three categories. First, religious tactics are played out in an asymmetrical field in which the clergy is the sole beneficiary; while religious Marxists rarely succeed in attracting the religious masses, a simple decree from a member of the clergy can mobilize the masses against religious Marxists.Footnote 92 Second, the state is a far more capable employer of religious tactics than is the (non-clerical) opposition. According to Jazani, “with its control over religious outlets, the state is infinitely more effective in influencing the desires of [the most backward segment of the masses], than are our religious friends with their meager resources.” Third, the use of religious tactics “prevents the development of revolutionary and progressive characteristics among the masses.”Footnote 93 Rather than propagating it, progressive forces ought to expose religion for what it truly is: “a superstructural remnant of a bygone era which shall be systematically uprooted from society, albeit through peaceful means.”Footnote 94 Still, Jazani is explicit that at the present moment Marxist–Leninists need not openly reject religion; “the struggle against religion,” Jazani writes, “is tomorrow’s task.” Until then, Marxist–Leninists ought to take care not to hurt “the religious feelings of the masses,” all the while unmasking and disparaging the backward clerical establishment.Footnote 95
For Jazani, to the extent that religious Marxists are part of a broader anti-monarchy alliance their errors negatively impact the entirety of the revolutionary movement.Footnote 96 Though he questions the possibility of a Khomeini-led revolution, Jazani nevertheless warns that religious Marxists may sabotage the prospects of a working class victory, setting the stage for a post-revolutionary clerical takeover.Footnote 97 Indeed, commenting on the “new circles of religious intellectual who speak of the renewal and refinement of Islam,” he argues that these efforts will fail to move the masses and will only bolster the position of the clergy.Footnote 98 Such reformist efforts, he adds, are bound to be defeated because “they seek to revive something that has been condemned to inexistence and that is incompatible with the progressive desires of our present day humanity.”Footnote 99 In Jazani’s view, the enterprise of religious reform is at its best a wasteful use of intellectual and political resources, and at its worst a harbinger for the rise to power of clerical forces and their petite bourgeois benefactors.Footnote 100
Conclusion
Erāni and Jazani articulated their critiques of religion in vastly different contexts and with markedly different audiences in mind. The former’s entry into political life coincided with the transition from Qajar to Pahlavi rule. By the time Erāni returned to Tehran from Berlin, Reza Shah had already consolidated his power, embarked on a massive modernization program, and was about to task the Majlis with outlawing all manner of subversive political activity including the promotion of communism. It was in the context of a near-total eclipse of leftist activism, then, that Erāni and his Dunyā circle sought, through their veiled advocacy of Marxism, to sway the emerging modern intelligentsia and “to create a hegemonic Marxist trend in Iranian modernity.”Footnote 101 His intellectual innovations notwithstanding, Erāni’s overriding preoccupation with identifying the causes of an ostensible cultural–intellectual backwardness in Iran and his view of mystical religiosity as a major impediment to progress echo the religious skepticism of a previous generation of Iranian reformist intellectuals such as Mirzā Fath-ali Ākhūndzādeh and Mirzā Āqā Khān-e Kermāni.Footnote 102
Jazani, by contrast, articulated his critique of religion at a time when the Left, though it was still subject to political repression, possessed a stronger social base. In the two decades leading to the 1979 revolution, the leftist opposition—of both religious and secular varieties—made gains particularly among the urban middle class and university students.Footnote 103 If Erāni, having no illusions about the prospects for imminent revolutionary change, had tasked himself with bringing academic Marxism to the intelligentsia,Footnote 104 Jazani theorized and strategized for the self-identified vanguard of the proletariat which was preparing to lead the future revolutionary uprising. In a context where Islamic socialism was regarded as a rival ideology to the Marxist–-Leninist ideology of the OIPFG, Jazani articulated his critique by way of cautioning against the retrograde reverberations of religious politics and of religiously based ideological production. His was not meant as a public critique of religion. Jazani was explicit that Islamic Marxism or Marxist Islam was written as ideological guidance for Marxist–Leninists at a time when talks of reconciling Islam and Marxism–Leninism were underway within the OPMI.Footnote 105
Differences in context and intended readership only partially account for the different ways in which Erāni and Jazani use Marxian concepts to analyze the role of religion in Iranian social and political life. Erāni, it is true, sees in Marx’s dialectical materialism a powerful critique of religion that shows in no uncertain terms the inevitable movement of history away from false religious consciousness and toward rational, scientific thought. But it is Jazani who tries to systemically reread through Marxist class analysis Iran’s modern history and the interplay therein of religion and public life. Whereas Erāni is convinced that due to increasing western influence “from now on thoughts and beliefs in Iran will correspond to global norms,”Footnote 106 Jazani urges his readers not to ignore the contextual differences between Iran and modern western societies.Footnote 107 His close reading of the religio-political dynamics of such key historical episodes as the tobacco protests, the Constitutional Revolution, and the 1963 uprising set Jazani apart not only from Erāni but also from other secular leftist intellectuals of his own generation.
Still, in Jazani’s text one finds what appears in hindsight to be an overestimation of the extent to which Iranian society had become secular or irreligious in the latter half of the twentieth century. While maintaining that historical differences with Europe had assigned religion a different social role in modern Iran, Jazani nevertheless agrees with Erāni that the overall trajectory of change in the country is toward secularization and westernization.Footnote 108 Alarmed though he may be by the possibility of a post-revolutionary clerical takeover, Jazani is still adamant that religion will not be a significant factor in the coming revolutionary uprising of the masses.Footnote 109 Convinced that industrialization and land reforms have brought an overall decline of religion in Iran, he argues that Muslim Marxists commit a “tactical mistake” by exaggerating “the influence of religion on the masses” and disregarding “the social transformations that have weakened religion’s standing in society.”Footnote 110
The prominence of religious leadership, ideologies, symbols, and social agents and networks in Iran’s 1979 revolution challenged the hypothesis that industrialization and modernization had eroded public religiosity in late twentieth century Iran. As one leading historian argues, the Pahlavis’ modernization measures led not to a social decline of religion but instead to a growing chasm between two cultures; while segments of “the elites” became increasingly westernized and secular, “the masses” remained religious and kept close ties (or else forged new ones) with the clerical class.Footnote 111 According to Keddie, Iran’s two-cultures phenomenon, which was itself rooted in the unevenness of the country’s economic structures, helped to make “religiousness” one of the “hallmarks of certain classes in society.”Footnote 112 Keddie’s two-cultures hypothesis, and Abrahamian’s observation that “organized Islam” began to appear and spread in Iranian villages in the latter half of the twentieth century,Footnote 113 are consistent with Moghadam’s verdict that the “Islamic revival” movements in the Middle East emerged in response to “rapid industrial growth and the concomitant structural and cultural transformation.”Footnote 114
Whereas Erāni could not be faulted for not foreseeing the phenomenon, Jazani’s critique was developed at a time when the growing public visibility of religion was in full swing in many parts of the world. Such was observed by Richard Wright in The Color Curtain (1956), where the renowned African-American novelist and essayist chronicled his visit to Indonesia to attend the 1955 Asian-African Conference in Bandung. Reflecting also on his previous travels in West Africa, Wright remarked that the postcolonial moment had brought in Asia and Africa a return to religious traditions in public and private life.Footnote 115 In Islamicate contexts, where religion had already featured prominently in anticolonial struggles, the rise of the postcolonial nation-state seemed only to multiply the sites of interaction between religion and public life. By the 1970s, the rise of Islamism and Islamic liberation theology, the return to sharia, and the resurgence of veiling were among the latest manifestations of the same phenomenon.Footnote 116
The assumption in both Erāni’s and Jazani’s thought of a direct path between industrialization and the social decline of religion is based neither on actual changes in the patterns of religiosity in Iran or its neighboring regions, nor even strictly on Marx for whom the elimination of religion comes not from industrialization but from the elimination of the material conditions of alienation.Footnote 117 Instead it recalls a key tenet of the secularization paradigm within which much of twentieth century social theory including some varieties of Marxism were conceived.Footnote 118 The paradigm, which takes the experience of social and political secularism in northern Europe to be a universal byproduct of industrial modernity,Footnote 119 proved to be of little use for explaining the 1979 revolution in Iran, the 1960s and 1970s liberation theology movements in Latin America, the return of the church in post-Soviet societies, or the continued vitality of public religiosity in advanced industrial and post-industrial societies such as the United States.
To the extent that their critiques of religion assume features of the secularization paradigm, Erāni and Jazani may be said to have privileged in their analyses particular northern European experiences of modernization at the cost of marginalizing other local or global experiences.Footnote 120 This is neither to suggest that Erāni’s and Jazani’s critiques are on the whole Eurocentric nor to diminish their relevance to their respective contexts or to our contemporary moment. Both men ought to be recognized for their nuanced analyses of the interplay between religion and collective life in Iran. One finds in their critiques a keen effort, though with varying degrees of success from a contemporary vantage point, to steer clear of essentialism, generalization, and linearity, and to stress diversity, complexity, and change. Taken together, Erāni’s and Jazani’s contributions represent a current of the secular Left that takes seriously the intersection of religion and political life, recognizes diversity in the formation of the religious and the secular, keeps a critical–skeptical outlook on religion, and draws on Marxian—though not always strictly Marxist—analysis to identify and to devise strategies against the ways in which the dominant Islamic-Shi’i norms, practices, agents, and institutions, reinforce oppressive and exploitative relations.
