On the Fall of Islamic Activism in the Shi'i Paradigm
Traditional accounts of modern Shi'ism divide leading jurists into two camps: the Quietists and the Activists. One of the contentions I will be making in a book I am preparing (more details on that later) is that there is sort of a collapse to the middle from these two traditional poles. The Activist view, that the jurists must run the state, still firmly holds in Iran among its ruling elite, but it has suffered a considerable loss of prestige. As for Quietism, or the view that the jurist must disassociate himself from the state to the fullest extent possible, nobody really holds to that in its purest form anymore.
The next two posts will be about exactly what happened to force this turn to the middle. As for Islamic Activism, one of its earliest theorists, and really the person who gave it most of the intellectual heft, was Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, a Najaf based jurist killed in Iraq in 1980. Khomeini is often given credit for the position because it was he who popularized the phrase "The Guardianship of the Jurist", but really much of what he wrote was just a development of Sadr's original notions.
Sadr was in many ways a brilliant figure, a master of jurisprudence, I have a paper in the Virginia Journal of International Law that discusses his economic ideas in some detail. Unfortunately, however, one thing that neither he nor Khomeini seemed to envisage was that by entering into politics, the jurists might be corrupted by it, and their esteemed centers of learning reduced to appendages of political organizations required to stay on message and adapt those messages to suit political needs. Tragically, having been trained within these institutions, they had more faith in them than was warranted--the kind of faith that, translated to the US, would lead one to think that somehow if the faculty at Harvard was left in charge of running the country, the country would be enriched, and Harvard's academic standards unaffected by this most unnatural union.
As we might expect, the Sadr vision proved too idealistic to be realized. While Iran might be criticized for any number of things, from human rights abuses to the treatment of women, it is in the considerable, and embarrassing, decline of its juristic elite in the past decade that I think has done in the notion of juristic guardianship, or at least limited its extension beyond Iran. The apex of that movement appears to have passed.
That was not apparent in Khomeini's rein, as he was considered a respected jurist, never as widely followed or respected as Ayatollah Khu'i, his Najaf based Quietist Rival, but a high cleric of his own right I think it's fair to say. Problems emerged, however, when it became clear that his successor, Grand Ayatollah Montazeri, seemed determined to take the country on a different path. Khomeini parted ways with the fellow, and when Khomeini died, a different cleric was left in charge, Ayatollah Khamene'i, still Iran's Supreme Leader. One problem--he did not have near the clerical standing of Montazeri, or Khu'i, or Sistani, or Shari'atmadari, or the late Khomeini. He's not a complete nobody, but not a cleric of serious renown. In the same way that you don't take a law fellow and make them Dean of Columbia Law School, so this rattled the clerical establishment.
Moreover, it made mavericks like Montazeri more dangerous. Khomeini did not really need to do very much to Montazeri other than declare him not to be the successor. Khomeini had standing, he could let the guy run his seminary and not care and just dismiss him as irrelevant. (This was not the case with another, earlier senior cleric who Khomeini did silence, Shari'atmadari. But there weren't enough people senior to Khomeini to make this silencing jurists approach necessary very often for him.) Once Khamane'i is in charge, however, there are no insignificant number of clerics more respected, and Montazeri, one of them, cannot be left untouched or trouble might brew. So he is placed under house arrest from time to time, his house is ransacked by thugs on occasion, signals are sent out to the entire clerical establishment to toe the line, and prestige suffers,as it would at Harvard if a less qualified fellow became Dean and started beating up recalcitrant faculty. This becomes acutely obvious when Saddam finally falls in Iraq, and Najaf can flower again as potential competition to Qom. And Sistani is now really the fellow you talk to if you want to know something about Shi'i Islam. Very few would think to consult Khamane'i on a point of shari'a. In the grand competition between the learning centers of Qom in Iran and Najaf in Iraq, Najaf is back on top, and is where the interesting work is being done. Qom has dropped in prestige.
That's not to say nobody interesting has graduated from Qom seminaries, but for the most part, if they are interesting, and want to be good, they have to lay off the politics at least a bit. They could say a thing here or there, or enter into the fray once in a while, but they couldn't really try to take an active role in state administration. If they did,and didn't want to be arrested, then they'd have to stay on message and toe the Khamene'i line, and that's not what makes a renowned scholar. Maybe a policymaker, but not a scholar. Hence the bleed away from Activism towards something less than full assumption of political authority. Tomorrow we'll explain what happened to Quietism to cause a move in the same direction.
HAH
The next two posts will be about exactly what happened to force this turn to the middle. As for Islamic Activism, one of its earliest theorists, and really the person who gave it most of the intellectual heft, was Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, a Najaf based jurist killed in Iraq in 1980. Khomeini is often given credit for the position because it was he who popularized the phrase "The Guardianship of the Jurist", but really much of what he wrote was just a development of Sadr's original notions.
Sadr was in many ways a brilliant figure, a master of jurisprudence, I have a paper in the Virginia Journal of International Law that discusses his economic ideas in some detail. Unfortunately, however, one thing that neither he nor Khomeini seemed to envisage was that by entering into politics, the jurists might be corrupted by it, and their esteemed centers of learning reduced to appendages of political organizations required to stay on message and adapt those messages to suit political needs. Tragically, having been trained within these institutions, they had more faith in them than was warranted--the kind of faith that, translated to the US, would lead one to think that somehow if the faculty at Harvard was left in charge of running the country, the country would be enriched, and Harvard's academic standards unaffected by this most unnatural union.
As we might expect, the Sadr vision proved too idealistic to be realized. While Iran might be criticized for any number of things, from human rights abuses to the treatment of women, it is in the considerable, and embarrassing, decline of its juristic elite in the past decade that I think has done in the notion of juristic guardianship, or at least limited its extension beyond Iran. The apex of that movement appears to have passed.
That was not apparent in Khomeini's rein, as he was considered a respected jurist, never as widely followed or respected as Ayatollah Khu'i, his Najaf based Quietist Rival, but a high cleric of his own right I think it's fair to say. Problems emerged, however, when it became clear that his successor, Grand Ayatollah Montazeri, seemed determined to take the country on a different path. Khomeini parted ways with the fellow, and when Khomeini died, a different cleric was left in charge, Ayatollah Khamene'i, still Iran's Supreme Leader. One problem--he did not have near the clerical standing of Montazeri, or Khu'i, or Sistani, or Shari'atmadari, or the late Khomeini. He's not a complete nobody, but not a cleric of serious renown. In the same way that you don't take a law fellow and make them Dean of Columbia Law School, so this rattled the clerical establishment.
Moreover, it made mavericks like Montazeri more dangerous. Khomeini did not really need to do very much to Montazeri other than declare him not to be the successor. Khomeini had standing, he could let the guy run his seminary and not care and just dismiss him as irrelevant. (This was not the case with another, earlier senior cleric who Khomeini did silence, Shari'atmadari. But there weren't enough people senior to Khomeini to make this silencing jurists approach necessary very often for him.) Once Khamane'i is in charge, however, there are no insignificant number of clerics more respected, and Montazeri, one of them, cannot be left untouched or trouble might brew. So he is placed under house arrest from time to time, his house is ransacked by thugs on occasion, signals are sent out to the entire clerical establishment to toe the line, and prestige suffers,as it would at Harvard if a less qualified fellow became Dean and started beating up recalcitrant faculty. This becomes acutely obvious when Saddam finally falls in Iraq, and Najaf can flower again as potential competition to Qom. And Sistani is now really the fellow you talk to if you want to know something about Shi'i Islam. Very few would think to consult Khamane'i on a point of shari'a. In the grand competition between the learning centers of Qom in Iran and Najaf in Iraq, Najaf is back on top, and is where the interesting work is being done. Qom has dropped in prestige.
That's not to say nobody interesting has graduated from Qom seminaries, but for the most part, if they are interesting, and want to be good, they have to lay off the politics at least a bit. They could say a thing here or there, or enter into the fray once in a while, but they couldn't really try to take an active role in state administration. If they did,and didn't want to be arrested, then they'd have to stay on message and toe the Khamene'i line, and that's not what makes a renowned scholar. Maybe a policymaker, but not a scholar. Hence the bleed away from Activism towards something less than full assumption of political authority. Tomorrow we'll explain what happened to Quietism to cause a move in the same direction.
HAH
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