Date: Thu, 20 Jun 2002 18:52:04 -0400 (EDT)
From: Laury L Silvers <lsilvers-AT-ic.sunysb.edu>
Subject: HAB: FWD: islamaar: Habermas back from in Iran (Interview) (fwd)



I passed along the citation provided by the Hab list and Tazim Kassam went
and got the translated article of Habermas' comments on his trip to
Iran.  I thought I would pass this along, and with that thank you all for
letting me participate in your list.  I'll be unsubscribing after this.

Thanks again, Laury Silvers-Alario

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 20 Jun 2002 17:33:01 -0400
From: lsilvers <lsilvers-AT-skidmore.edu>
To: lsilvers-AT-ic.sunysb.edu
Subject: FWD: islamaar: Habermas back from in Iran (Interview)

>===== Original Message From Tazim Kassam <tkassam-AT-syr.edu> ===='The Unrest Is Growing'
by Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung *
Tuesday June 18, 2002 at 11:02 PM


How far should the reforms go? How serious are the reformers about
withdrawing religious theory and the religious community from its fusion
with state authority? Ultimately, however, I never got more than a
pragmatic answer: The objective is to progress step by step and in doing
so learn from the process.

'The Unrest Is Growing'

German philosophy has for many years had a wide audience in Iran, and
the works of Jurgen Habermas have counted among some of the most
widely read. Germany's most renowned contemporary philosopher recently
spent a week in Iran at the invitation of the Center for Dialogue
Between Civilizations created by President Mohammad Khatami. On his
return, Habermas spoke with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung about his
trip.

He expressed his surprise at the "informal" manner in which
philosophers, sociologists, journalists and artists conducted numerous
official and unofficial discussions about the country's theocratic
system. While in the Islamic Republic, Habermas appeared at the
University of Tehran, a symbolic location where the official Friday
prayer ceremony takes place, to speak on "Secularization in the
Post--Secular Societies of the West."

The event drew such a large crowd that the students surrounded the
lecture hall, engaged in lively debate. The Iranian press, in turn, made
the connection between Habermas's ideas and the country's current
political situation. The only criticism came from anti-reform factions
of the press, which used earlier statements from Habermas concerning
Salman Rushdie to attack his hosts in Iran, above all former Culture
Minister Ayatollah Mohajerani, who was dismissed a year and a half ago
as a result of his liberalization policies:


-------------------------------------------------------------------------
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FAZ: What was behind the timing of this trip to Iran?


JFCrgen Habermas: The first contact was made seven years ago. Last
fall, after talking to my Iranian colleagues, I was convinced that
Ayatollah Mohajerani, former culture minister and ally of President
Mohammad Khatami, was the right person to host such a visit. Mohajerani
fought hard to liberalize the press while in office. "The West is only
interested in our heads when they roll," Egyptian Nobel prize winner
Nagib Machfus once said.


What were your expectations, and your reservations?


Nobody likes to be used by the wrong people to promote a wrong cause.
One of my Iranian students sent me a concerned e-mail from Chicago. The
list of names of political prisoners was growing continually. I received
a letter from the wife of imprisoned journalist Khalil Rostamkhani. The
German branch of P.E.N., the writers' organization, informed me that
70-year-old journalist Siamak Pourzand had just been given an eight-year
sentence.


Were these fears confirmed?


The legal discrimination against women, the political persecution of
dissidents and, if the State Department is to be believed, the support
for Hezbollah cannot be ignored. I was also immediately disturbed by the
larger-than-life posters with the heads and mottos of the religious
leaders of the revolution, which were somehow reminiscent of communist
East Germany. They play a different role than do the posters in the
streets of Tehran and across the countryside depicting the bearded faces
of the "martyrs" meant to preserve the memory of those that fell in the
long and bloody war against Iraq. The cultural center we visited
unannounced was performing an unsubtle scene from the life of the
prophet -- Mohammed at the gates of Mecca. This is what I have always
imagined the Oberammergau passion play to be like.


Such first impressions are bound to make you wonder. But the
preconceptions you take with you are not just differentiated by the
normality of the mundane, which stubbornly persists in any regime. The
picture of a centrally administered, silent society in the grip of the
secret police just doesn't fit -- at least not from the impressions I
received from my encounters with intellectuals and citizens of an
uninhibited, spontaneous and self-confident urban population. The
fragmented power structure is more likely to itself be drawn into the
momentum of a lively, multi-factioned society than to have it under
control.


The unrest is clearly growing among a population disappointed by the
hesitancy of the reformers. A young political scientist whom I met in a
secularistic and resolutely pro-American group admitted that he likes to
return home from Chicago, where he occasionally teaches, despite all the
difficulties that await him. In Iran, he says, there is at least a
political public realm with passionate debates.


Where did you run into taboos, barriers or limits during your
discussions?


The forthcoming and well-informed people I talked to had no major
inhibitions about drawing me into substantial and exciting discussions.
Nor did I notice any obvious restraint in terms of politics. Our talks
often concerned Israel's right to exist or the names of jailed
dissidents. You don't see your own limits.


Only once did I experience what you could call a barrier among the
people I was talking to. A young mullah who graduated in Montreal had
traveled from Qom, the old pilgrimage center where the central
university for the Shiite clergy is based. He turned up for our meeting
with a young son, three fellow-believers -- including one American --
and an interesting question. The latter related to my proposal to
translate the semantic content of religious language into a
philosophical, also secular language. He said this was all well and
good, but would this not cast the world itself in a religious light?


The mild tone of our discussion took a turn when I asked him a question
of my own. Why does Islam not rely solely on its own medium of the Word,
why doesn't it abandon political means of coercion? The mild, ascetic
guest opposite me replied quite brusquely to my request for a religious
explanation. It was a moment when the veil appeared to lift for a
second, revealing a dogmatic rock of granite. At the end of the
discussion, after listening in silence to his pupil, the old ayatollah
made an attempt at appeasement by giving me a book -- a textbook he had
written that was translated into English by a Center for the
Preservation of Ancient Religious Texts in the United States. I later
discovered that it really does read like a medieval text.


During the subsequent discussions, one of the philosophically-minded
guests made a late attempt to offer the reasoning not provided by the
mullah. He turned Max Weber's concept of occidental rationalism from its
head, as he said, to its feet. It was evident today, he said, that the
development of European modernity appeared to be the real exception,
when compared to the other major cultures, and its pathological
convolutions demanded more urgent reflection than those of Islam. Edward
Said in reverse? Just as we have a distorted perception of the Orient,
they have their counterpart -- "Occidentalism." This attitude, however,
is rather untypical for the receptive academic situation that I
otherwise encountered in Tehran.


How are the philosophical and sociological debates in the West adapted
for the religious and philosophical debates in Iran?


When you travel from the West to the East with light intellectual
baggage, you encounter the usual asymmetry of underlying perceptions
that maintain our role as the barbarians. They know more about us than
we do about them. Most of the sociologists I met were educated in
France, but now follow developments in the United States. Regarding
philosophy, there seems to be growing interest in Kant and the
Anglo-Saxon analysts, as is the case with contemporary principles of
political philosophy.


But the stimuli for the publicly influential intellectual debates have a
different background. During the 1990s, Martin Heidegger and Karl Popper
provided the key terminology for a debate between Reza Davari Ardakani
on the one side and Abdolkarim Sorush on the other. Davari is now
president of the Academy of Sciences and classed with the
"postmodernists." The latter were particularly drawn to the analysis of
the "nature of technology" in Heidegger's later writings and linked it
to the Iranian critique of Western modernity.


Sorush, meanwhile, who is currently spending a semester as guest
lecturer at Harvard, personally tends toward a mystical branch of Islam,
but, as a Popperian, is a resolute adherent of a cognitive division of
labor between religion and science. If I understood it correctly, during
this dispute Davari rose to the status of philosophical spokesman of the
Shiite orthodoxy, while Sorush continues, albeit with dwindling
influence, to favor an institutional division of political and religious
realms.


At the first official meeting, I was glad when a familiar name emerged
from the fog of strange sounds: Davari wanted to comment. He saw the
reason, as developed in Western metaphysics, as too narrow to do justice
to intuitive insights that go beyond the mere rational, which throws
open the argument of whether "reason" can be automatically equated with
"instrumental reason." The discussion took a turn into current affairs
when somebody familiar with John Rawls brought up human rights; should
the latter enjoy universal application despite their Western origins?
The question came from the Popper translator, who forced me into a
Kantian response. Suddenly, an old constellation of the debate sparked
by Popper and Heidegger seemed to have been reestablished.


Have the problems being discussed today in Iran -- the relationship
between state, society and religion -- not been resolved in Europe
through the Enlightenment and secularism, through constitutions that
guarantee religious freedom?


The point of my two public lectures was to address this question. I was
then surprised at the informal manner in which the foundations of the
theocratic regime were debated by a broad academic audience.


What was the debate about?


The Iranian authorities only grant the small Zoroastrian, Jewish and
Christian minorities, in other words the "predecessors" of Islam, the
right to openly practice their religion -- but not, for example, the
Bahais. At the same time, they impose a way of life prescribed by
Islamic law on everybody, including non-Muslims. This provokes the
question of whether religion is unable to preserve its life-determining
force when it relinquishes political power -- when it makes direct
appeals to the conscience of the individual, voluntarily-associated
member of the community and only exerts indirect political influence,
via the diverse mass of opinions of a liberalist public. The discussion
was primarily concerned with the contextual dependencies -- the
feasibility of applying the European model. Is fundamentally secured
religious pluralism not in fact a Western phenomenon? Is it bound to the
historical circumstances of its emergence, or does it provide a
plausible solution to what is becoming an increasing problem for all
societies? Do other cultures not have to find at least an equivalent
solution?


Discussions in Iran sometimes give the impression that participants have
returned to the Reformation. Or do these problems still apply to Europe?



The reflexive development of a religious consciousness that survives
within the complex framework of modernity is a process that must take
place from within. The way that Islam adapts in this cognitive manner
concerns us in Europe because we need to find more than a just a weak
compromise with our Muslim communities. All citizens should, after all,
be able to accept the principles of the constitution from their own
understanding.


I think it is impossible to overestimate the political significance of
theological debate within Islam. Today, a cleric like Mohammad Mojtahed
Shabestari has assumed the role of the prominent critic played in the
1990s by a secular philosopher like Sorush. Shabestari in fact spent a
few years in Hamburg and speaks fluent German. He is of the hermeneutic
tradition, sees the individual believer as an interpreter of the
revelation and challenges the ruling orthodoxy with Protestant-sounding
arguments. In any event, he stresses modern subjectivity as a place of
religious inwardness. His perception of the dialectical relationship
between belief and knowledge is intended to open Islamic theology to the
humanities and contemporary philosophy. Above all, his
hermeneutically-enlightened concept of religious tradition enables him
to provide a more abstract definition of the essential content of
prophetic theory and distinguish it from the conventional traits of what
has become a historical way of life.


While in Iran you also met prominent intellectual reformists associated
with President Khatami. Do you believe that the reformers are prepared,
where necessary, to overcome the conflict emanating from the Iranian
Constitution between democracy and theocracy in favor of democracy?


Mohsen Kadivar is a younger mullah who went to jail after publishing a
Shiite critique of the legal foundations of Khomeini's regime in 1998.
Through him I met the group that you are referring to: both Shabestari
and Said Hasjarian, whose body still bears the marks of an assassination
attempt from almost two years ago. As a group, we discussed this issue.
How far should the reforms go? How serious are the reformers about
withdrawing religious theory and the religious community from its fusion
with state authority? Ultimately, however, I never got more than a
pragmatic answer: The objective is to progress step by step and in doing
so learn from the process. Even during this, by far the most important
discussion, I was unable to see how the reformers envisage the "third
way" of a synthesis of East and West.


Other discussions did give me a minor insight into the political
mentality of these disappointed figures from the birth of the
revolution. Under the Pahlavi regime -- perceived as corrupt,
technocratic and completely estranged from the population -- religious
tradition had by 1978 already become the only remaining morally sound
force. Marxism, too, was still bound to the mentality and culture of the
West. Young people back then wanted a liberating alternative, and what
they got was religious despotism in the form of an undemocratic
dual-system regime. The association of the initial feeling of
emancipation with the name Khomeini may sound obscene to us, but for the
former revolutionaries it is probably a defining biographical moment.


My impression is that the reformers do not want to become renegades.
Many of them are simultaneously critics and representatives of the
regime. They wish to see their reforms -- the establishment of the rule
of law and democracy, the creation of an effective administrative
authority, an endogenous boost of economic growth through a controlled
opening to the global market -- as a revised continuation of the course
of the revolution itself. To this extent, the reformers are also loyal
to the constitution. This was what Ayatollah Beheshti's son, who went to
school Germany, wanted to express when he said: There will be no
revolution within the revolution.


Can Iranian society solve these contradictions?


Nobody knows that, of course. You would, for example, have to have a
greater insight into the thoughts of young women, above all those with
an academic background. Women already comprise over half the student
population. How many of them would take off their headscarf in public if
they could? Do these heads contain a powder keg that the regime of the
old ayatollahs has to fear more than anything else?


As an example, the mostly apolitical tourist guide who accompanied me to
Persepolis just finished her studies. She speaks English, is interested
in Freud and Jung and reads translations of contemporary American and
Portuguese novels. She is appalled by the situation of a friend whose
spouse is quite nasty and who will not agree to a divorce. All the court
did, my guide said, was to encourage her to give it another try. No, she
doesn't mind the separation of genders at the mosque. But she rejects a
purely conventional religious practice. If a deeply-felt religious
belief is present, a Christian or a Jew count just as much as a Muslim.
She is sure: "Cultural relations," meaning the amount of freedom in her
own private life, have changed since Khatami first came into office. She
points to her headscarf to illustrate her point: It now sits a little
further back, revealing a few inches of hair.


The interview was conducted by Christiane Hoffmann.
Jun. 18

A9 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 2002



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