Date: Sat, 22 Jun 2002 00:24:28 -0400
Subject: Re: HAB: Re: FWD: islamaar: Habermas back from in Iran (Interview)


bob,

I wholeheartedly empathize with your critique of "nihilist" 
Occidental secularism, but these negative aspects are perhaps yet 
part of the growing pangs of humanity's adolescence, immature 
expressions of nascent freedom. After all, it is Habermas's stated 
mission to reject a turning backward (even to endearing childhood 
'innocence'), to keep faith in the project of Enlightenment. Perhaps 
Islam can learn from Western mistakes and develop a healthier 
sacred/secular balance and a more successful version of modernity.

--tom

>  >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.
>
>Given the nihilist character of Occidental secularism: idiot consumerism,
>the tyranny of bottomlessly vulgar pop-cult, social atomization, destruction
>of the person and conformity to insipid subjectivity,  mania for wondrous
>technology of apocalyptic killing machines, brutally insensate bourgeois
>imperialism...abortion, euthenasia, cloning, given this concrete reality of
>modern Occidentalism, how can Habermas be so assured, as to proselytize?
>...instead of, like Tiresias, warning them off Western influence?...and in
>favor of preserving and strengthening,  cultivating and deepening
>traditional culture?...isn't granite the necessary and sufficient condition
>for foundations?
>
>bob
>
>
>
>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: Laury L Silvers <lsilvers-AT-ic.sunysb.edu>
>To: <habermas-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu>
>Sent: Thursday, June 20, 2002 6:52 PM
>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:
>>
>>
>>  -------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>  -------
>>
>>
>>  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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>
>
>
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