Over the past century or so, Iranian intellectuals including writers, poets, academicians, artists, and thoughtful clerics have offered a plethora of discourses about a wide array of socio-cultural, religious, and political issues. The nature, scope, vibrancy, and broader political relevance and influence of these views have been shaped by the social and political atmosphere. However, much of the dynamic intellectual discourses since the constitutional revolution of the early twentieth century indeed have been oppositionist and rich in philosophical underpinning and political content.
Mehran Kamrava's book is a thorough, thoughtful, and meticulous survey of the contemporary intellectual discourses under the repressive circumstances in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Kamrava's impressive command of the Farsi language and the Shi'a lexicon affords him a keen and accurate understanding of the nuances of the three main intellectual discourses in today's Iran. By relying on the Sunnati (traditional) Fiqh, conservative intellectuals oppose significant Ijtihad (independent judgment) and largely follow the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's insistence that the faithful should observe the divine ordinances, which leaves little room for human reason or independent decision-making. In rejecting the absolutism of this perspective, religious reformers subscribe to a Puya (dynamic) Fiqh, which uplifts human reason as a sound Islamic principle and thus calls for a transformational change in approach to the believer's relationship with God and the nature of authority. The logical political implication of this reformist world view is commitment to individual and communal rights and the need for civil society and pluralism. Finally, the secular-modernist discourse posits religion as an impediment to modernity and the search for Western democratic pluralism in the Muslim world.
To properly assess the scope, coherence, and political relevance of these discourses, the major task is to examine each in its historical, socio-religious, and political contexts. In this sense, Kamrava's historiography is inadequate. To treat past intellectual discourses, particularly those that carried sway during the Pahlavi dynasty, as somewhat monolithic is to dismiss the tremendous impact of Iranian intellectuals in shaping the most dynamic era of civil society in the Iran of the mid-twentieth century. A more in-depth analysis would have revealed a plurality of intellectual discourses that are in fact the precursors of the current debates under a similarly repressive climate. Kamrava's painstaking efforts at conceptualization throughout the book are undermined by the internal incoherence of some of these discourses, on which he could have elaborated further. In the religious reformist and secular modernist discourses, there is often a careless and contradictory treatment of such phenomena as modernism, post-modernism, secularism, development, and democratic-pluralism. Some of the harsh criticisms of Ali Shari'ati and Jalal-e Al-e Ahmad offered by these intellectuals (particularly secular-modernists) are due to these intellectuals' limited understanding of Western societies' experiences as well as their dislike for the current regime in Iran. In the final analysis, any indigenous developmental path for Iran must take note of the shortcomings of the Western socio-political experiments and the ever-presence of Shi'ism in the Iranian culture. This is the only way that such intellectual discourses among Iranians can leave the narrow hallways of universities and publishing houses and the relatively small circles of the educated middle-class to impact the masses who continue to follow a stale, conservative clerical worldview despite its questionable Islamic roots, and its inability to offer solutions to Iran's growing socioeconomic and political problems.
