In Religious Secularity, Naser Gobadzadeh explores secularism as a religious discourse and introduces a vast array of opinions aiming to construct a genuine Islamic doctrine for secularity offered by religious intellectuals in Iran. Gobadzadeh coins the term “religious secularity” to characterize this discourse. The difference between “secularism” and “religious secularity,” according to this study, seems to be that while the former defends the liberation of state from religion, the latter accentuates the emancipation of religion from state. The basic motive is to save religion from being reduced into a political tool.
Gobadzadeh observes that the authoritarian excesses of the new state established by the Iranian-Shiite Islamists in 1979 disillusioned a group of religious reformist scholars and intellectuals such Mohsen Kadivar, Ayatullah Montazari, Hassan Yousefi Eshkevari, Mehdi Haeri-Yazdi, Mojtahed Shabestari, Mahdi Bazargan, and Abdulkarim Soroush. In the following decades these reformist thinkers, regardless of differences in perspectives, methodologies, and accentuations, aimed to provide an alternative religious discourse to defend modern political ideas such as secularity, democracy, and human rights. This discourse is religious for it starts from Islam in general and the Shia tradition in particular, and it is secular for it seeks to liberate religion from the state.
The book presents a through and clear analysis of a seemingly oxymoronic term, religious secularity. The discourse on religious secularity departs from the realization of the detrimental effects of the unification of religion and state on religion. Religion is reduced into a tool, genuine religiosity is subjugated to the state policy, and, thus, hypocrisy is disseminated. The emphasis on the legal aspect of religion undermines its spiritual and ethical functions. Moreover, the whole enterprise is based on the false assumption of the all-comprehensiveness of religion. This “unrealistic expectation” leads not only to further disenchantment with religion but also blaming religion for governance failures. Religious secularity deprives the state of having a sacred foundation, emancipates religion from state and offers a more conducive environment in which genuine religiosity can be cultivated. Some aspects of this criticism can easily be transferred into the Sunni world. In this regard, the book is likely to find readership among those who are interested in not only the Iranian religio-politics but also the question of religion and state in general.
The book consists of an introduction and six chapters. The introductory part briefly summarizes the content of the book and introduces the concept of religious secularity. Chapter 1 focuses on the question of the compatibility of divine and popular sovereignty with a special emphasis on the Shia tradition. The chapter presents a line of arguments targeting the linchpin of Iran's Islamic state, the doctrine of Velayat-e Faqīh that propounds religious reasons for the necessary governing role of Islamic jurists in the absence of the absolute religio-political authority, the 12th Imam during the Occultation Era. Chapter 2 scrutinizes the consequences of the wedding of religion and state in Iran. Gobadzadeh argues that Iran's experiment has proved to be highly detrimental on genuine religiosity. The concept of expedient jurisprudence (fiqh al-maslaha) has been employed as a tool to by-pass religious principles such as justice. This highly utilitarian treatment of religious precepts subverted them under political aspirations and led to the emergence of religious hypocrisy. Chapter 3 focuses on the religious arguments for “an indigenous theory of Islamic secularism” that start from the observation that religion is silent on socio-political issues and intentionally limits itself to the sphere of belief, spirituality, and worship. Otherwise, Islam is deprived of its more fundamental spiritual and ethical core and becomes the scapegoat for the failures of human reasoning and ambitions in this extremely complex, tentative, and slippery domain. Chapter 4 investigates how Khomeini's religio-political thought and conduct after the 1979 revolution led to widespread domination of clergy in the socio-political domain. This chapter also provides an analysis of the process the institutionalization of clerical sovereignty after effective constitutional changes. Chapter 5 explores the divergence of opinion within the clergy itself. Khomeini, Gobadzadeh observes, fails to gain support of some of the most influential religious leaders such as Ayatollah Shariatmadari and Ayatollah Montazeri. The majority of Marja-e Taghlids remained either openly critical or passively a-political in the post-revolutionary era. Chapter 6 explores how the clerics' conflict of interest between their religious-spiritual and political roles further problematizes the legitimacy of their leadership role. It also presents arguments questioning the clerical authority from a more traditional and historical perspective of the Shiite jurisprudential-theological and decentralized and quietist political thought.
Two observations on the critical side are in order. First, the book sometimes is repetitious. Second, all the arguments provided in the book to ground religious secularity seem to revolve around the invalidation of the unification of state and religion without a detailed treatment of the proposed alternative model, religious secularity. Namely that the book makes a case for the adoption of secularity on religious bases but does not pay an equal attention to the lived complexities that emerge, not uncommonly, in the encounter of religious and secular claims on issues like ḥijāb, public alcohol consumption, homosexuality, censorship, evolution, etc. On these issues both religious and secular claims seem to exist. The difficulty is that religious secularity, as it was introduced in the book, seems to start from the claim that religion is silent on many issues to carve out areas for “secular” knowledge and applications. This however would be contrary to the claims of most Muslims who believe that Islam is actually quite specific, at least, on these issues. The book could benefit from a more detailed treatment on how religious secularity could transcend this predicament and answer those challenges on the more practical level.
It is important to realize the difficulties of the context in which these authors are voicing their opinions that sometimes could impose tactical retreats. However without dealing with these more concrete, practical, and complex issues the discourse on religious secularity cannot be deemed as complete.
