International Journal on Criminology Volume 7, Number 2, Spring 2020 | Page 42

Secularization Versus Secularization: Understanding the System in the Islamic Republic of Iran
Khosrokhavar, 3 should be understood as the process whereby issues “from transcendent
become immanent,” 4 thus becoming landmark concepts for resacralized
globalizing political ideologies.
The current Iranian regime, which relies on velayat-e faqih, that is, the
guardianship of the religious jurist, paradoxically entered the circle of secular ideologies
through a complex, two-stage process, symptomatic, in our view, of any
such entry into modernity: traditional religion was desacralized in such a way as
first to make its transcendent pillars of belief secular and modern, and then resacralized
to be established as political religion. This type of secularization, in the
sense of immanentization, came from above, unlike the new secularist aspirations
currently observed in Iran that take the form of a popular movement, spreading
through society below the level of the state, and coextensive with disenchantment
with the theocratic model.
Placing this second meaning alongside the traditional definition of secularization
forms an Archimedean point for understanding present-day Iran: the
Islamic Republic is neither the result of a break with secularization nor of a “desecularization,”
as Peter L. Berger in particular puts it. 5 Seeing the establishment of
Islam and its traditions in Iran as a step backward would amount to restricting
oneself to simply applying the Western concept of secularization to the Iranian
context.
The Islamic Republic is in itself a secularization of Shiism, that is, a theocracy,
a government according to the laws of God. It is both the outcome of and
the reason for two forms of secularization in Iran: the one initiated by the policy
of modernization and Westernization of former regimes—especially that of the
Pahlavi dynasty—and the other consisting of a desire to define an identity specific
to Iran by rejecting foreign elements.
Western-Style Secularization: Between Assimilation and Rejection
Westernization, in its political and economic aspects, entered Iran from
the nineteenth century, and it was very quickly perceived by many Iranian
intellectuals as a cultural phenomenon that threatened Iranian
identity. While earlier events bore witness to the initiation of this process (we are
thinking in particular of the Tobacco Protest against Talbot’s Régie in 1890), the
1906 Constitutional Revolution seems to us to be the culmination of a dual effect
3 See Farhad Khosrokhavar, “Two Types of Secularization: The Iranian Case,” in Worlds of Difference,
ed. Saïd Arjomand and Elisa P. Reis (Sage Publications, 2013).
4 Ibid., 121.
5 See the collection edited by Peter L. Berger, The Desecularization of the World: The Resurgence of
Religion in World Politics (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company,
1999).
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