Matin, Kamran. “International Relations in the Making of Political Islam: Interrogating Khomeini’s ‘Islamic Government”. Journal of International Relations and Development, Vol.16, No.4 (2013): 455–482.

Matin, Kamran. “International Relations in the Making of Political Islam: Interrogating Khomeini’s ‘Islamic Government”. Journal of International Relations and Development, Vol.16, No.4 (2013): 455–482.

• The disputed Iranian elections of 2009 strike at the core of the blending of democratic and divine legitimacy upon which the Islamic Republic of Iran is based. The Constitution defines the basis of government authority as coming from popular assent, whereas the powers of the Supreme Leader is predicated on an extension of divine authority (456).
• This form of mixed government was always acceptable to Ayatollah Khomeini and reflects the mixed demographic and ideologic basis of the revolutionaries in 1979. It is a blend of Islamism and the institutions of a liberal democratic state (475).
• Many scholars are stuck viewing European secularism as 'normal', whereas the religious and Islamic state-building in Iran is seen as 'exceptional', 'aberrant', or 'pathological' (456). This viewpoint of exceptionalizing Islam as incompatible with secular statehood is being increasingly challenged by scholarship looking at how all religions have fought against modernity and played a role in other historical revolutions (457).
• The author suggests that Islam is currently the primary religion fighting against secularism because of a specific aspect of the Middle East's place within global capitalism. He seeks to analyze this position using Leon Trotsky's theory of uneven and unequal development (457-458).
• Eurocentrism is the claim that modernity originally appeared in Europe and that the driving force of history has been the imitation of European modernity by other states and thus the expansion of modernity. It claims that societal progress is determined by factors internal to that society and its unique history (458-459). Experiences that do not follow this pattern of adopting and replicating European modernity are deemed 'exceptional' and explained with reference to the 'exotic' and 'deviant' social, cultural, and historical conditions of that country or region (475-476).
• Recent scholarship has challenged this view by positing multiple modernities that arose independent of and competed with European modernity. This approach fails to challenge the notion that societal progress is determined by internal factors. Other work in poststructuralism does argue against this assumption, but fails to create an alternative theory (459).
• The author feels that Leon Trotsky's theory of uneven and unequal development is a successful alternative theory to Eurocentrism because it can account for historical difference because of different factors, and because it does not require a single source of modernity (459-461).
• The author's methodology in looking at the political works of Ayatollah Khomeini is detailed on pages 461 and 462.
• The Safavid Dynasty sought to gain regional hegemony, in competition with the Ottoman Empire, and justifying their rule on the basis of Shiism as descendants of the Prophet Mohammad. Under the Safavids, the Shia clerics were empowered in education and the judiciary (463).
• As the traditional sources of revenue from war booty and long-distance trade declined due to European expansion in the 17th Century, the Safavids intensified their taxation policies, while trying to protect their own lands from taxation by converting them into waqf estates. Over the course of the dynasty, the clerics' guardianship of royal waqf transformed into de facto ownership, giving the clerics an independent economic base (463).
• The Qajar Dynasty lacked the claim of Mohammadian descent made by the Safavids, meaning that they had to actively court the support of the ulama by offering clerics additional autonomy and power. The clerics ended up dominating Iranian civil society and allied their interests with those of the merchant class (463).
• After a series of military losses to Russia and Britain, the Qajar monarchs realized that reforms were needed to protect the country from foreign aggression. They originally attempted a range of administrative, military, and financial reforms, but these efforts were opposed and halted by the ulama. With domestic reforms blocked, Qajar Iran was forced to make financial and commercial concessions to Britain and Russia to the great displeasure of Iranian merchants (463-464).
• Local elites, including both clerics and major merchants, were aware of Iran's weakness vis-a-vis Russia and Britain and were angry about the government's concessions. This manifested itself in a number of protest movements -- including the 1891 Tobacco Boycott led by prominent merchants and supported by the ulama to protest the British monopoly on tobacco, and the Constitutional Revolution between 1906 and 1911, inspired by the 1905 Revolution in Russia, which established a liberal democratic body and constitution (464).
• The Russian Revolution inspired Iranian leftists, supported by the Bolsheviks, to overthrow the weakened Qajar monarchy and establish a socialist state there. They succeed in establishing a socialist state in the northern province of Gilan, but were then defeated by Reza Khan after his British-backed coup in 1921. Reza Khan, now Shah of Iran, was supported by foreign powers, major merchants, and clerics, all in opposition to Communism (464-465).
• Reza Shah imposed a number of modernizing reforms in the army and administration, and legalized the private ownership and sale of land. He also pushed aside the ulama from government. His regime was based upon the support of major landlords in rural areas, the urban mercantile class, and the British (465).
• In WWII, Reza Shah's pro-German sympathies were seen as dangerous considering the country's strategic location near an unoccupied Soviet border, so Iran was jointly occupied and he was forced to abdicate in favor of his son, Mohammad Reza. Liberal and democratic movement grew relatively free from oppression during this period (465).
• Liberal and democratic politicians in Iran increasingly concentrated on Iran's oil resources, held by Britain since 1907, as a necessary tool for national development, which in turn would hopefully weaken the leftist movement in Iran. This was accomplished under Mohammad Mosaddegh, but was removed in a 1953 American-backed coup after the British convinced the US that he had Soviet sympathies. Mohammad Reza Shah was placed in control of the country, ruling with the support of conservative clerics (465).
• Mohammad Reza Shah and his American advisers were increasingly spooked by the possibility of a leftist peasant revolution, as had occurred in China, Cuba, and Korea, and so sought to implement a series of reforms to preempt possible peasant grievances. Beginning in 1962, this reform campaign -- known as the White Revolution of the Shah -- redistributed land to break up the hold of large landlords and ulama in the countryside, and greatly increased the scope of secular education and administration (465-466).
• The reform program broke the rural power of the landlords, but allowed them to access credit schemes to become major industrialists or financiers. The new land tenure system ended up forcing millions of peasants off of their land and resulted in mass migration to urban slums, where former peasants were impoverished and underemployed. Merchants generally benefitted from the reforms, but resented their exclusion from some commercial opportunities offered to major industrialists or foreign companies (466).
• Clerics lost their domination of education and the judiciary as a result of the reforms, as religious schools and courts were closed down. They still retained the right to collect zakat and tithes in their areas, however, and ran all religious institutions. Many attendees of new schools, however, sympathized with or were part of the ulama, and these educated Islamists would come to dominate the Islamist movement and ally it with urban merchants (466).
• The situation in Iran in the 1960s and 1970s was one of the emerging industrial and service economy being dominated by foreign companies and a small financial elite with close connections to the state, while the major of commerce remained controlled by the traditional merchant class, who were allied with the clergy. The civil service itself was staffed by educated youth sympathetic to the clerics (467).
• By the late 1970s, the Iranian government had run out of development strategies and was internationally isolated. The financial crisis of the 1970s had taken its toll on Iran, as had President Jimmy Carter's sanctions on the country, causing the Shah to resort to brutal repression and force to retain control (467).
• Lacking any strong ideological authority, the Iranian government was easily challenged by a message of revolutionary Shiism, which had support among the middle classes and the clergy (467). The Shah had failed to control Iranian civil society, as he was able to speak to secularists, but most civil society remained dominated by religious discourse (468).
• Ayatollah Khomeini's political views were shaped by an amalgamation of Third Worldist populism and an idiosyncratic understanding of Shiism. The author considers Ayatollah Khomeini's non-religious thoughts to be beyond the scope of this paper, so only his religious writings are discussed (468-469).
• The political rhetoric and terminology used by Ayatollah Khomeini in his writings reflect this ideological blend. His attacks on conservative clergy is very similar to those made by socialists, and many of the terms he uses to describe Western imperialism and the capitalist system are very similar to those used by leftists (473-474).
• Ayatollah's Khomeini's political thought began with the notion that, in the aftermath of the White Revolution, the alliance between the Shah, the clergy, and the traditional mercantile class no longer made sense. Seeing an increasingly powerful and assertive Shah exclude the merchants and clerics from power, and increasingly turn towards Iran's pre-Islamic history for legitimization, Ayatollah Khomeini concluded that the only solution was the overturning of the traditional division of roles between the state and the clergy (469).
• This turn towards revolutionary thought only occurred in the late 1960s, whereas in previous works castigating the Iranian government in 1946 and 1963, Ayatollah Khomeini called on the Shah to respect the constitution and thought within the framework of accepting some role for secular authority (469-470).
• The notion that, in the absence of the Twelfth Imam, the ulama could rule in his stead is a theological innovation with no precedent in Islamic thought. Although his own idea, Ayatollah Khomeini drew on other recent Islamic radicals to create his ideology, especially Ali Shariati and Ayatollah Murtaza Mutahhari (470).
• Despite his attempts to claim that his ideas have a long basis in traditional Islamic thought, it should be recognized that the Ayatollah Khomeini's ideas were original theological innovations (474).
• Ali Shariati, a student and close friend of Ayatollah Khomeini, and Ayatollah Mutahhari, a respected Islamic scholar, both articulated political visions different from those of Ayatollah Khomeini. Both scholars had worked to turn Shiism into an expansive ideology and theory to compete with other political ideologies, in particular, Marxism (470).
• One of the major advantages of Marxism and the nationalist discourse of the Pahlavi regime was their claims to address the problem of Iranian underdevelopment and backwardness. Ali Shariati and Ayatollah Mutahhari sought to provide a Shia answer to this issue, arguing that a reinvigoration of spiritual energy through Islamic rediscovery would push the country towards development (470-471).
• Ayatollah Khomeini specifically connects the poverty and underdevelopment of Iran to the exploitation and subordination of Muslims by foreign imperialism. His work specifically addresses the arguments by secular nationalists and Marxists that secularization is needed to achieve development, instead arguing that development can only be achieved by rejecting foreign institutions and laws and truly embracing Islamic government and sharia (471).
• Ayatollah Khomeini's claims about clerical authority stems from verse 4:59 of the Quran, which most scholars interpret as indicating the role of the clergy as judges and spiritual guides for rulers, but which Ayatollah Khomeini asserts calls for clerics to directly govern (471-472).
• Started from the broadly accepted point that sharia requires an appropriate authority to interpret and apply the law, it followed that the government that enforces sharia law should be led by clerics, who have both the proper learning and the authority to rule granted by God in verse 4:59. Since the state must enforce sharia, it makes sense that only those with the greatest Islamic learning and highest moral standards should be trusted to govern (472-473).
• This reinterpretation of the idea of the 'imamat' from a spiritual category applying solely to the Prophet and his Rightly-Guided Caliphs into a political category for all clergy made it is a religious obligation for all clerics to fill this governmental role and for all laypeople to submit themselves to the rule of the Islamic jurists (473).
• The idea of Islamic rule conceptualized by Ayatollah Khomeini extends even beyond that conceived by other prominent Shia Islamists, including Ayatollah Khamenei. He advocates for supreme power to be vested in an individual of impeccable Islamic learning, even allowing that individual to order political changes that would normally be considered in contravention of sharia law (473).