Interiorizing Islam: Religious
Experience and State Oversight
in the Islamic Republic of Iran
Kathleen Foody*
Recent work in religious studies has turned from a long-standing focus
on interior expressions of religion to emphasize instead embodied
worship and the materiality of religious expression. Yet, for all the
worthwhile critique of experience as a theoretical category, in practice
various communities have taken up the language of experience as a
central term for their own traditions. Scholars of religion have traced the
cross-pollination of modern Hindu and Buddhist traditions with the language of “experience”; however, this question has received little attention
in the study of Islam. This article addresses that lacuna. Muslim writings
on Islam, specifically within the Islamic Republic of Iran, demonstrate a
clear engagement with “religious experience.” The Muslim writers discussed here, major figures of the Iranian reformist movement of the
1990s and 2000s, attempt to craft an arena of religiosity untouchable by
state law and the Islamic Republic’s governance of religious action.
The tired ones have all departed. Shut the house’s door. Laugh together
at those tired people. Come to the Ascension (miʿrāj) since you are the
Prophet’s people. Kiss the Moon’s cheek since you stand on heights of
splendor.
—Jalaluddin Rumi
*Kathleen Foody, College of Charleston, International Studies, 66 George Street, Charleston, SC
29424, USA. E-mail: [email protected].
Journal of the American Academy of Religion, September 2015, Vol. 83, No. 3, pp. 599–623
doi:10.1093/jaarel/lfv029
Advance Access publication on May 7, 2015
© The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press, on behalf of the American Academy of
Religion. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]
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Journal of the American Academy of Religion
RECENT WORK IN RELIGIOUS STUDIES has turned from what
was a long-standing focus on interior expressions of religion to emphasize
instead embodied worship and the materiality of religious expression
(Jantzen 1995; McCutcheon 1997; King 1999; Chidester 2000; Fitzgerald
2000; Schmidt 2003; Vásquez 2011). Scholars have argued in particular
that the category of “experience” amounts to a “depoliticization of ‘religious experience’” and an attempt to keep “politics, materiality, embodiment, power relations, and social ethics off the scholarly table” (Schmidt
2003: 274). Yet, for all the worthwhile critique of experience as a theoretical category in the academic study of religion, in practice various communities have taken up the language of experience as a central category for
their own traditions. Leigh Schmidt in particular has noted a productive
tension between critique of the theoretical category—the limitations of
“experience” for the study of religion—and attention to the historical contexts that birthed that category itself. The project to historicize the study
of mystical experience “needs to be extended to those who were responsible for dehistoricizing and universalizing the term in the first place. . . .
The process of mysticism’s reinvention in departicularized form needs
itself to be particularized and seen in its own historical complexity. . . .
The critique of such scholarly categories requires, in other words, a
firmer historical grounding—one that allows for better understanding
even of the religious liberals who produced the models now being taken
apart and summarily dismissed” (Schmidt 2003: 275).
One might ask similar questions regarding the place of “experience”
in traditions and discourses located outside the historical lineage of the
American academy. Scholars of religion have traced the cross-pollination
of modern Hindu and Buddhist traditions with the language of “experience” (Sharf 1995; King 1999); however, this question has received little
attention in the study of Islam. As I demonstrate below, contemporary
Muslim writings in the Islamic Republic of Iran incorporate language of
“experience” as part of a marked turn to interior and individualistic
forms of religiosity.
The Muslim writings I analyze arise out of the Islamic Republic of
Iran, a state that is hardly “secular” in a simple sense and is emphatically
nonliberal. If, as Talal Asad states, the “distinction between law (which
the state embodied, produced, and administered) and morality (which
is the concern ideally of the responsible person generated and sustained
by the family)” was central to the legal constitution of the modern
nation-state (2003: 236), then it is this very centrality that the Islamic
Republic seeks to overcome. Yet Asad’s arguments echo an earlier observation by the Iranian professor and Islamic politics specialist Hamid
Enayat: “politics,” as a distinct realm of intellectual activity, became part
Foody: Interiorizing Islam
601
of Muslim conversations only with the encroachment of European (and
later American) powers (1982: 3). The Muslim Iranian debates I discuss
below represent attempts not merely to come to terms with this modern
political realm, but to reconfigure it. In other words, Muslim turns to religious interiority and “experience” partake of both global formations of religion-as-category as well as local genealogies and political realities. The
Islamic state in Iran provides a unique context for one very particular set
of discourses that dehistoricize and depoliticize religious experience.
Here, I focus on writings by Abdolkarim Soroush (b. 1945) and, by
way of comparison, Muhammad Mujtahid Shabestari (b. 1936). Scholars
of contemporary Islamic politics have seen Soroush in particular as emblematic of a liberal turn among modern Muslim intellectuals. Farzin
Vahdat and Merhzad Boroujerdi, both social scientists who focus on contemporary Iranian debates, represent Soroush as seeking to overcome
Iran’s “tormented” and conflicted path to modernity (Boroujerdi 1996:
156–175; Vahdat 2002: 182–211). Soroush then stands in for a liberal formation of Islam, one that not only finds agreement with human rights
and democratic government, but also with liberal forms of subjectivity
that place the power to interpret and define Islam in the hands of individual Muslims. In contrast, Saba Mahmood has critiqued such affirmations
of liberal Muslims in general and Soroush in particular. In her reading,
liberal reinterpretations of Islam might validate American imperial projects directed against more “traditionalist” Muslims (Mahmood 2006).
My concern here is not to affirm or critique the claims to interiority
made by these contemporary Muslims; rather, my interest is in the mobilization of Islamic sources in order to depoliticize Islam. This mobilization is itself overtly political—a claim to make safe and retake space
overwhelmed by the authoritarian state apparatus of the Islamic Republic
and its claims to religious authority.
During the 1990s, Abdolkarim Soroush and Muhammad Mujtahid
Shabestari became two of the most significant Muslim reformist voices in
Iran. While active dissent was common during the first days of the Islamic
Republic in Iran, war with Iraq raised other concerns during the 1980s and
allowed the state to centralize its control, tamping down most overt criticism. Only in the mid-1990s did critical discourses become increasingly
public yet again. State censorship of the press loosened for a time and a
reform movement blossomed in part through the circulation of new journals and monographs. The most prominent of these discourses embedded
their critiques in Islamic sources and claimed interpretative power over the
same traditions that authorized the Islamic Republic. Several of the authors
who became prominent during this period attempted to refocus the
Islamic tradition around interior states and personal transformation—in
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short, around arenas of “religious experience” (tajribat-i dīnī). Soroush and
Shabestari’s attempts to reframe Islam draw on distinctly different sources
from the Islamic tradition. Whereas Soroush recovers arguments from
Sufism and Islamic philosophy, Shabestari looks to Muslim traditions of
law and ethics. Significantly, neither Soroush nor Shabestari is unaware of
the political import of their writings on Islam. Both purposely craft a secularist Islam. These secularisms are not only deeply engaged with Islamic
sources, but directly concerned with state power and the Islamic Republic’s
claim to religious–political authority.
Soroush, the first author I consider here, draws on foundational Sufi
writings to emphasize religious interiority and experience. He was an
early supporter of the Islamic republic who, like many Iranians, quickly
became disillusioned with the new government. During the 1990s, he
began publicly critiquing the state though veiled discussions of the contingent nature of religious knowledge. In these early epistemological arguments, Soroush drew on European philosophy of science to suggest that
“all religious knowledge is contingent on external non-religious knowledge for its development and growth and likewise is subjected to flow in
the sense that the context of its presuppositions is unfixed” (Dahlén 2003:
285). Soroush argued that because religious knowledge itself is limited
and contingent, modern Muslims must analyze religious precepts in light
of extra-religious reason (2000a, 2000b: 133).
More recently, Soroush has called for the separation of religious and
political authority, the separation of Islam from political systems of
power. In August 2000, Soroush suggested explicitly that “political secularism” is necessary in Iran. According to Soroush, by definition “political
secularism has two major pillars. One pillar consists of the question of legitimacy and the other consists of the political system’s neutrality towards
religious and theoretical schools. I believe that religious intellectuals have
so far argued well that the system’s legitimacy hinges on justice, not on
any particular type of religion, and the acceptance of the system comes
from the people” (2000a, 2000b: 5).
These political claims are intimately connected to Soroush’s epistemological project and his arguments regarding the nature of religious knowledge. One scholar of modern Iran has described Soroush’s epistemological
position as a “subjectivist approach to knowledge” because it centers on
human understanding (Vahdat 2003: 614). Soroush suggests that all knowledge, including religious knowledge, is “always enriched by newer . . . works
and the arrival of competing views and historical developments” (1991:
214–215, quoted in Vahdat 2003: 615). He argued that because religious
knowledge itself is limited and contingent, modern Muslims must analyze
religious precepts in light of extra-religious reason (Soroush 2000b: 133).
Foody: Interiorizing Islam
603
While much English-language scholarship has focused on Soroush,
his engagement with specifically Islamic traditions has been little discussed (Jahanbakhsh 2001; Ghamari-Tabrizi 2008; Mirsepassi 2011: 69–
84).1 Soroush himself is known within Iran as at least a popular expert on
the Sufi poet Jalaluddin Rumi, whose writings continue to constitute a
seminal part of Iranian Islam. Soroush’s writings consistently draw on
earlier Muslim authors, including Rumi, to undermine legalistic readings
of Islam and position religious experience (tajribat-i dīnī) as the central
element of Islamic religiosity.2
A hierarchy of religious life—graduating from external to internal
forms—is explicit throughout Soroush’s works: “one can divide the whole
of religiosity into three very large classes: expedient (maṣlaḥ at-andīsh)
religiosity3, gnostic or learned religiosity (maʿrifat-andīsh), and experiential religiosity (tajribat-andīsh).”4 If one imagines these classes of religiosity as a pyramid, the “expedient” form occupies the largest and lowest
level. The masses—as well as the majority of Islamic scholars—engage
with Islam only at this level. These individuals, according to Soroush, approach religion as a totalizing force and construct governments, economic
systems, laws, and sciences from it. Soroush condemns this model of religiosity. Those who follow it view religion only as a “tool” for achieving
“certain results or desired objects” (Soroush 2000c: 141). In the place of
expediency, Soroush positions gnostic and experiential forms of religiosity (2000c: 155). In various essays, Soroush values and distinguishes these
two in different ways, in one place prioritizing the gnostic religiosity and
in another the experiential. In an early essay, he suggests that “experience” or “illumination” is for the very few; in that same essay, Rumi is an
exemplar of gnostic religiosity, while in another, he is a model of the
experiential path. In both, however, Soroush utilizes the language of
religious experience to describe the goal of the individual Muslim.
Increasingly central in Soroush’s later works is a kind of leveling—a
collapse, albeit incomplete, of the uniqueness of prophets, saints, and
divinely guided leaders in light of universal access to interior mystical
states. He reimagines significant works from the Islamic tradition to
1
There are two works that do locate Soroush in a lineage of Islamic discourse: Sadri (2001) and
Dahlén (2003).
2
State authorities in Iran at times drew on these discourses as well. See, for example, Van den Bos
(2002). For a critique of Van den Bos, see Lewisohn (2009).
3
Maṣlaḥ at, translated in Iranian Studies often as “expediency” and in studies of Islamic Law as
“public interest,” is a significant term in Islamic jurisprudence and is particularly important for
modern Muslim legal thought. See Kamali (2003) and Johnston (2004). For uses of “expediency” in
the Islamic Republic, see Schirazi (1997) and Matsunaga (2009).
4
Soroush (2000a) presents these same categories.
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prioritize the religious experience of the individual and to void any external authority over that individual—particularly understandings of Islamic
legal authority that figure the Islamic Republic’s claim to power. Soroush
denies the utility of the Islamic Republic to govern Muslim practice by
positioning Islamic law as secondary and the experience of the individual
as primary.
The universality and preeminence of individual religious experience is
evident in both Soroush’s interpretation of Muhammad’s prophetic life
and his understanding of the political and religious authority of the Shiʿi
Imams, divinely guided leaders whose historical and interpretive position
is one feature that distinguishes Shiʿi from Sunni Islam. In one of his most
controversial works, Soroush reimagines even the prophetic capacity of
Muhammad as an experiential one framed by a limited historical personality.5 Prophecy—including the prophecy of Muhammad—is essentially a
matter of historically bounded individual “experience” (tajribat).
Here, Soroush draws on an economy of religious practice well known
in Sufi sources: the Sufi path (ṭarīqat) leads from formal practice or
divine law (shariʿa) to true reality (haqīqat). The shariʿa is only the first
stage on the path to divine union. At the same time, from the formative
period of Sufi organizations to the present, the majority of Sufis continually emphasized the importance of divine law. Their argument was not
that formal practice was insignificant, but rather that it was not sufficient
(Karamustafa 2007: 21). While Soroush’s economy of religious practice in
some ways mirrors earlier Sufi writings, his reading distinctly affirms the
agency and significance of the individual self in a way that would be
foreign to those earlier sources.6
One source Soroush draws on to make this argument is Muhammad
Abu Hamid al-Ghazali’s Deliverance from Error, an eleventh-century
spiritual autobiography.7 Soroush summarizes the religious trajectory
inscribed in the Deliverance from Error: “Ghazali selected the path of the
Sufis at the end of his spiritual and intellectual journey. By practicing the
5
This essay, “The Expansion of Prophetic Experience” echoes in title Soroush’s well-known work
on epistemology The Expansion and Contraction of the Theory of Shariʿa (Qabz va Bast-i Ti’urik-i
Shariat), published in 1990.
6
Soroush’s reading differs from normative Sufi accounts as well in that he places no importance on
choosing a particular Sufi path or brotherhood. This element, however, is less novel and relates to the
long evolution of philosophical-mysticism (ʿirfan) in Shiʿi contexts. Philosophical-mysticism shares
much with Sufi traditions, but differs greatly in its institutional structure. See Gerhard Böwering,
1998ʿErfān VIII/5: 551–554; available online at http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/erfan-1
(accessed on April 22, 2013); Pourjavady (1999); and Lewisohn (2009).
7
Histories of Sunni Islamic thought often identify Ghazali’s writings as the turning point in Sunni
theology, law, philosophy, and Sufism; yet scholars have focused less on the long engagement of Shiʿi
scholars with Ghazali’s writings. Soroush (1994) is his most extended discussion of Ghazali.
Foody: Interiorizing Islam
605
way of the Sufis he arrived at, in his own words, “the reality (haqīqat) of
the prophet’s mission and its qualities.” Ghazali “highlighted that . . . religious experience (tajribat-i dīnī) is the most foundational characteristic of
a prophet’s mission” (Soroush 2003/2004a: 6). Whereas no Muslim could
attain the same heights as the Prophet, Ghazali described a spectrum of
religious experience: “‘true dreams’ . . . are the lowest level of religious experiences” while “the higher levels are mystical tasting, ecstasy, and unveiling (mukāshifāt).” Only those who have had such experiences are
capable of determining the veracity of prophecy and prophetic experience
(Soroush 2003/2004a: 8).
For Soroush, the relationship between everyday dreaming and prophecy negates religious mediation and the timelessness of the prophetic
moment. An individual’s relationship to the Prophet Muhammad requires no kind of mediation; rather, “the path is open for all to understand prophethood and the Prophet. . . . The Prophet himself left this
path open for others” and prophets in general “have left often the path of
prophetic experience (tajribat-i payāmbarāna) for their communities and
followers” (Soroush 2003/2004a: 8). The prophets do not merely permit
this journey to prophetic experience; rather, they have encouraged it. “A
person who truly follows the Prophet is one who shares his tasting [of the
divine] (zawq) and ecstasy (vajd)8 or tastes [the divine] through him.
This kind of emulation is of course mystical (ʿarifāna) religiosity, not the
religiosity of Islamic jurists that is epitomized by commands (avāmir)
and prohibitions (navāhī)” (Soroush 2003/2004a: 9). Most emphatically,
in contrast to legal readings of Islam, “the condition for imitating the
prophet is imitating his experiences, not only following his commands
and prohibitions” (Soroush 2003/2004a: 8).
Soroush cites Jalaluddin Rumi (d. 1273) to further this argument, the
epigraph that began this article: “The tired ones have all departed. Shut
the house’s door. / Laugh together at those tired people. / Come to the
Ascension (miʿrāj) since you are the Prophet’s people. / Kiss the Moon’s
8
Both these terms constitute common elements of Sufi vocabulary. Translators at times have
rendered “tasting” (zawq) as “immediate experience” (see Ghazali 1953). In contrast, the term
Soroush uses that I and others translate as “experience” (tajribat) connotes a this-worldly life
experience in Ghazali’s writing. Translators of Ghazali have rendered various terms as specifically
“religious experience,” but as far as I am aware not this term “tajribat.” In addition, the translation to
“experience” often stretches the meaning of the original text considerably. For example, Sufism is
described in Ghazali’s Revival of the Religious Sciences by way of key terms from Sufi traditions:
maqām (the station occupied on the Sufi path); and ḥ āl (the Sufi’s present condition). In my own
translation, Sufis described their discipline as that through which “the servant [of God] realizes his
station and condition as from God.” This same line in one translation reads: “the science whereby the
creature, realizing his position in relation to the divine, has a mystical experience [in communion
with his God]” (see Ghazali 1962).
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Journal of the American Academy of Religion
cheek since you stand on heights of splendor” (2003/2004a: 9). The Prophet
Muhammad’s miʿrāj, his “night journey” or “ascension,” is one of the most
salient metaphors in Sufi writings and poetry.9 Although only hinted at in
the Qurʾan, other sources captured a remarkable epic journey in which the
Prophet is met by the Angel Gabriel and carried on the winged horse Buraq
from Mecca to Jerusalem. Once there he is lifted up through the heavens,
meeting previous prophets along the way. At the utmost height, God
explains to him the significance of prayer and, after some debate, instructs
Muhammad that the believers should pray five times a day, establishing this
central element of Muslim ritual practice. Annemarie Schimmel argued
that in premodern Sufi traditions Muhammad’s miʿrāj was “the main
object of mystical mediation. . . . The connection of the miʿrāj with daily
prayer—which was experienced by Muhammad as a repetition of the joy of
ascension . . . —made such an ascension into the divine presence possible
for every sincere Muslim” (2011: 218–219).
Soroush’s citation of the night journey does not completely discard
the importance of prayer and other kinds of formal worship; instead, it
follows earlier Sufis in reading these practices as the beginning of a path
to a higher goal: “All the commands for worship that have come through
religion (dīn), the supererogatory prayers, fasting, daily prayers, giving
alms, and charity . . . are part of the gateway that is open for people to
gain mystical and prophetic experiences. They take people by the hand
and show them the path for tasting prophetic states (aḥ vāl) and ecstasy”
(Soroush 2003/2004a: 8).
Yet Soroush’s interpretation does differ from historical Sufi writings,
as well as the Iranian-Shiʿi variance described as “philosophical-mysticism” (ʿirfān), the ultimate goal is the dissolution or annihilation ( fanāʾ)
of the self in the divine reality. As a twelfth-century Sufi described, the
highest station is that of “the lovers who have drunk the oceans of unity
in primordial gnosis and the rest of it, who are upon the ocean of greatness, whose clashing bequeaths the unknowings of realities to the people
of gnosis and love. They are in the station of annihilation; they have no
eye that is not obliterated, no heart that is not dismayed, no intellect that
is not annihilated, no conscience that is not vanishing” (Ernst 2011: 115).
Seyyed Hossein Nasr suggests that later Islamic philosophy as a whole,
not only Sufi traditions, was oriented around the principle of annihilation: “in the Islamic perspective, existence is not an accidental and a
faltering flame to be extinguished by the wind of death. Death is the gate
to a more intense degree of existence, whether this be natural death or
9
For an examination of early Shiʿi writings on the miʿrāj, see Frederick Colby (2010).
Foody: Interiorizing Islam
607
initiatic death accomplished through spiritual practice. Annihilation
(fanā’), which is the goal of the spiritual life, ends, not in the extinction
in the ordinary sense of the word, but in subsistence in the Divine” (2006:
90). This is particularly true of Rumi’s writing as well as Ghazali’s earlier
understanding of the Sufi path. What Ebrahim Moosa has described as a
kind of “alterity” in relation to the divine echoes through Ghazali’s writings, an attempt to write the relationship to an Other that dominates and
fragments the self (2005: 108). Likewise, Rumi “tells us that in order to
end any kind of duality, we need to approach self-annihilation . . .
[serving] almost as a ventriloquist for Ghazālī’s irenic impulses, finding
the appropriate register to explain the meaning of alterity” in relation to
the divine (Moosa 2005: 110–111). Rumi himself understood the death
of the self as an absolute necessity: “In His presence there is no room for
two egos (do anā). You say ‘ego,’ and He ‘ego’? Either you die in His presence, or He will die in your presence, so that no duality may remain. Yet
it is impossible that He should die, either in the universe or in the mind,
for ‘He is the living, who does not die.’ He has grace in such measure that,
were it possible, He would die for you to remove the duality. But since
His death is impossible, you die so that He may become manifest in you
and the duality be lifted” (1983: 24–25, quoted in Lewis 2000: 418).
Similarly, the notion of experience that Soroush highlights in the
Deliverance from Error is not foreign to Ghazali’s text, but rather takes on
a different valence in Soroush’s project. As Soroush suggests, Ghazali
does argue that regular Muslims might “possess a token of” the prophetic
state in their dreams (Ormsby 2008: 145). At the same time, Ghazali’s
discussion of dreams was not oriented around the category of the individual’s relationship to the divine or a defense of progressive development in
Islamic interpretation (both key themes in Soroush’s text), but rather a
defense of prophecy as such. Ghazali’s “‘argument from experience’
posits that it is our normal, trivial, insignificant dreams—the merchant’s
of his merchandise, the lawyer’s of his cases—that constitute the best
proof of prophecy. The argument rests on the assumption that dream
represents a different way of knowing from either sense impression or intellect. It is in the end the ‘poor man’s prophecy’” (Ormsby 2008: 146).
While Soroush’s writings on Islam arise out of both Ghazali and
Rumi’s works—as well as Islamic mystical traditions more broadly—he
does not use this language of annihilation; instead, the authority of individual experience replaces the dissolution of the self.10 Indeed, the
10
Soroush here seems to echo the South Asian intellectual Mohammad Iqbal (d. 1938) who
“expressed the desire for personal identity instead of annihilation.” His poetic collection Secrets of the
Self (Asrar-i Khudi) “presented a journey that begin with selflessness, but then proceeded towards
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Journal of the American Academy of Religion
personal experience of an individual—even a prophet—can have only
limited authority over another individual. While Ghazali’s discussion of
dreams defends prophetic reality, Soroush’s reading of Ghazali emphasizes
the Prophet’s humanity, the individual’s progressive and unmediated development, and the historical development of Islam itself. In short, Soroush
utilizes the language of religious experience in order to argue for this last
point—the historical development of Islam. This is the goal of his essay. He
argues that “if prophethood, in the sense of moving closer to the spiritual
worlds and hearing more precisely the message of the angels/inspiration, is
an experience, then this experience can become increased, richer, and
stronger. In other words . . . a prophet . . . gradually can become more of a
prophet” (2003/2004a: 10). This understanding of prophetic experience
then demands the recognition of Islam as a historical tradition—“In short,
this religion that we know as Islam, did not descend on the prophet all of a
sudden, but rather came into existence gradually and a religion that gradually comes into existence will later [continue] to have a gradual movement
and existence” (2003/2004a: 16)—human understanding of it will develop
and change over time. In focusing on the personality of the Prophet
Muhammad, Soroush emphasizes Muhammad’s humanity and, therefore,
that the door to prophetic experience is equally open to the individual
Muslim. In this way, Soroush locates the center of Muslim practice not as
annihilation of the self, but its completion. Muhammad, in a manner that
the individual Muslim can and should emulate, grows over time into a
more complete personality, not dissolving in the divine but growing
through it.
An affirmation of interiority and critique of external mediation extends
in Soroush’s writings even to the Shiʿi Imams.11 It is here that Soroush’s
concerns about the models of religious–political authority at the heart of
the Islamic Republic’s claims to power become most apparent, specifically
in terms of the Islamic jurists’ claim to “guardianship” (vilāyat) over the
Muslim community in the absence of the twelve Shiʿi Imams. According to
traditional accounts, Shiʿi Muslim understandings of religious authority diverged from Sunni theories during the lifetime of Muhammad, in different
readings of a speech Muhammad gave at a pool called Ghadir Khumm.
Muhammad stated that whoever took Muhammad as his valī—his friend,
lord, or master—should consider his cousin and son-in-law Ali as his valī
self-control and [a] vice-regency . . . totally committed to the transformation of the world” (Tayob
2010: 36).
11
Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi has argued that Soroush’s interpretive frame became increasingly
historicist as his disappointment with Iran’s reformist movement grew, eventually linking “the
weakness of democratic institutions in Iran to Shiʿite messianism” (2008: 238–240).
Foody: Interiorizing Islam
609
as well. Authoritative accounts (ḥ adīs) from both traditions acknowledge
this event; however, Sunnis place no special importance on this moment
and read it only a sign of Muhammad’s affection and respect for Ali (who
would become the fourth Sunni Caliph and remains generally respected by
Sunnis as well). In contrast, Shiʿi scholars gradually grounded their theologies in a distinct reading of Muhammad’s words and his identification of
Ali as the valī of the Muslim community.
For Shiʿi Muslims, Muhammad not only designated Ali as his friend,
but appointed him as his successor—as the “lord” or “master” of the new
Muslim community. Ali and his descendants would become known as
the Imams, divinely guided leaders of the Shiʿi communities, sinless, and
granted special insight into the Qurʾanic text. The theology of the Imams
that developed over the next several centuries made little distinction
between the authority of the Imams to politically lead the Muslim community and their spiritual prowess; quite to the contrary, their right to
political leadership was grounded in their special spiritual insight. While
in theory, the only just ruler of the Muslim community was the Imam,
the Imams were politically marginal after the first generation. In practice,
Shiʿi Muslims negotiated varied approaches to both interpretative authority over Islamic texts and governance of the community, both during the
lifetimes of the Imams themselves and even more so following the disappearance of the twelfth and final Imam in the ninth century (Sachedina
1988; Modarressi 1993; Amir-Moezzi 1994; Kohlberg 2003; Dabashi
2011).
In the absence of the Imams, Islamic scholars claimed interpretative
authority over religious texts. In recent centuries, their organization
became more centralized, forming a diffuse hierarchy marked by knowledge, piety, and just practice as well as social and monetary capital
(Arjomand 1984; Amanat 1988, 2009; Fischer and Abedi 1990: 112–114;
Kazemi Moussavi 1996). Throughout this long history, scholars were
more often than not content to distinguish their own position from that
of the ruling authorities. Only in the middle of twentieth century, in stark
contrast to a long history of established practice, did Islamic scholars
argue that they themselves should rule. Following the 1978–79 Iranian
revolution, Ruhollah Khomeini took leadership of the new government,
arguing that a Muslim polity in fact required the governance of Islamic
jurists. This authority to govern arose from the jurists’ knowledge of
Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh), which Khomeini understood as ideally indistinguishable from the legal reasoning of the state. The “guardianship
of the jurist” (vilāyat-i faqih) which in the previous century marked the
social duty of jurists to provide care for widows, orphans, and the insane,
was transformed by Khomeini into a broad principle of political rule. The
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constitutional framework of the Islamic Republic of Iran, as well as—in a
more complicated way—its actual legal practices, rests on this conjunction of state and Islamic law (Khomeini and Algar 1981; Abrahamian
1982; Mottahedeh 1985; Arjomand 1988; Fischer 2003; Gleave 2003: 95–
114).
Soroush’s reconfiguration of the Imams’ authority—as with the
Prophet Muhammad’s experience of revelation—targets this reality of the
Islamic Republic’s claim to power. His reading cuts to the core of Shiʿi
theology: the Imams continue to guide the interior self, while political
realms are left to secular decision-making. The “interior” (bāṭinī) and
“political” (siyāsī) are distinct realms in which the Imams modeled different kinds of leadership. He critiques the current state, arguing that the
word “guardianship” (vilāyat)—the foundational term of the Islamic
Republic’s “guardianship of the jurist”—has been read in two ways. The
term itself “means unmediated ‘nearness’ and ‘closeness’” (Soroush 2003/
2004b: 252). God’s guardian, then—his “valī,” the term used to designate
Ali, the first Imam of the Shiʿi tradition—is “someone who has the greatest closeness to God and in whose existence God is best reflected. He is
the representation of God and God’s representative” (Soroush 2003/
2004b: 253). The “mixing” of these two meanings—“the representation of
God and God’s representative”—“has brought great theological-political
complications to the history of Muslims. . . . A ‘representative’ is someone
who has a mission. A ‘representation’ is someone who reflects the qualities of another like mirror . . . it is a very colossal question whether or not
someone’s best ‘representation’ is also his best ‘representative,’ and
whether or not these two qualities must co-exist in one person” (Soroush
2003/2004b: 253).
While these two qualities were joined in the Shiʿi Imams, for contemporary Muslims, it is necessary to distinguish and parse out their distinct
characteristics. The Imamate is a political post—a question of being
God’s representative; although certainly the Imams also mirrored the
qualities of God and were in part chosen as his representatives for this
reason (Soroush 2003/2004b: 270). While Muhammad did indeed
appoint Imam Ali to leadership of the Muslim community, this was a political appointment. In Soroush’s reading, the political leadership of the
Imams—though not negotiable in itself—exemplified disputation and
debate. He recalls the story of a well-known disciple who “refused to accompany . . . [Imam Ali] in a battle. He said: ‘I do not think this war is
right; give me permission to perform some other task instead of accompanying you’ . . . [Imam Ali] accepted this and sent him somewhere else.
This is what external leadership (riāsat-i ẓ āhirī) requires. . . . The Shiʿa
used to question Imam Sadiq and Imam Baqir [as well]. . . . It is not as
Foody: Interiorizing Islam
611
though the Imams were considered exempt from questioning simply
because they were Imams. . . . When someone answers your questions it
means they consider themselves questionable and they accept that they
must provide reasons for their actions” (Soroush 2003/2004b: 277).
In contrast, the spiritual guardianship of the Imams was and continues
to be absolute, even in their absence.12 As Rumi argued, without the
“shade” or the guardianship of a religious leader, it is impossible for an individual to reach God, and in this context “testing the Sheikh [or Imam]
and raising objections are absolutely inadmissible” (Soroush 2003/2004b:
258). Although the Twelfth Imam is absent from the material world, he
continues to give “spiritual and inner guidance to people . . . from behind
the veil”; he does not, however, provide “political leadership” (Soroush
2003/2004b: 275). These two kinds of guardianship came together in the
lives of the Shiʿi Imams, but their union ended with the occultation of the
Twelfth Imam. The “guardianship of the jurist has no part of philosophicalmystical (ʿirfānī) and interior (bāṭinī) guardianship . . . the word is only used
so that a group of people can mix this guardianship (which means . . . political leadership) with that guardianship (which is specific to the friends of
God and the elite of his threshold). It would be better to use the term ‘the
rule of jurist’ [rather than the ‘guardianship of the jurist’] . . . ‘Ruling’ has a
completely this-worldly and non-holy meaning. . . . If it is the continuation
of anything then it is the continuation of the external leadership of the
Imams, not their internal guardianship” (Soroush 2003/2004b: 280–281).
This disjuncture between political and internal guardianship discredits
the Islamic Republic’s claim that its political authority is based on the religious necessity of the jurists’ guardianship. Interior religiosity and internal
guardianship—the joint core of Shiʿi practice in Soroush’s reading—is continually fulfilled by the Hidden Imam. The external and political aspect of
the Imamate not only allowed the questioning of regular Muslims, but they
were disconnected from the Imams’ religious authority—an argument that
completely dissolves the claim to political authority at the foundation of
the Islamic Republic.
When reading Soroush, it is important to avoid a simple conflation
between Sufism and interiority, one that is quite apparent in both popular
and academic Euro-American perceptions of Sufism. As one scholar of
Sufism has argued, in spite of Sufi writings that emphasize the importance
12
Soroush’s argument echoes earlier statements by the Egyptian ʿAbd al-Razziq (d.1966) who
“proposed a distinction between political and religious roles of the Prophet Muhammad” and then
“extended this distinction to his successors. Since Muhammad was the final messenger, they could
only have succeeded him in his non-religious role. The first successors of Muhammad could only
have represented him in his political capacity” (Tayob 2010: 107).
612
Journal of the American Academy of Religion
of social life, “the study of Islamic mysticism continues to borrow theoretical frameworks which relegate mysticism to a privatized realm, focusing on
‘mystical experience.’ Many such frameworks are the result of a postEnlightenment, Protestant worldview in which the realms of ‘religion’ and
‘mysticism’ have been privatized and defined in opposition to ‘rational philosophy.’ Pre-modern Persian Sufis would have difficulty recognizing
themselves in such restricted definitions of mysticism, perhaps in many of
the same ways that their Christian counterparts would” (Safi 2000: 260).
To at least this extent, Soroush’s reading of Sufism as emblematic of
an interior, asocial, and distinctly apolitical religiosity contrasts with historical Sufi traditions. The salience of interior models of religiosity in
Iran is instead a response to the presence of the modern state and its circumscription—whether Islamic or secular—of the domain of appropriate
religious action. This reflection of the state is evident even in Iranian writings that emphatically discount the Sufi tradition itself. One author,
Muhammad Mujtahid Shabestari, argues that Sufism has never been
central to Muslim life (2006b: 162); yet, as with Soroush, he aligns the interiority and individualism of personal religious experience with a critique of external authorities, a denial of the religious and political
mediation at the heart of the Islamic Republic’s claims to power.
Shabestari, like Soroush, was a major intellectual figure during the
1990s in Iran. Unlike Soroush, Shabestari received classical training in
the Shiʿi seminaries in Qom before assuming a position as Professor of
Islamic Philosophy at the University of Tehran, where he taught for
many years. He supported the Islamic Republic early on and served in the
Majles (Parliament) for a term before becoming disillusioned with the
new government. During the 1990s, Shabestari became part of the “Kiyan
circle,” a group of intellectuals (including Soroush) who published reformist articles in the monthly journal Kiyan. Shabestari’s critiques in
particular focused on questions of hermeneutics and the multiplicity of
interpretations of religious texts.13
Like Soroush, Shabestari critiques religious bases for democratic
government. Counter to several of Shabestari’s critics who suggested
that equality of religions, democracy unbound by “the laws of god,” and
the “anthropological presuppositions” of democracy contradict Islam,
Shabestari argues that the choice Iranian Muslims must make is “not
between Islamic and non-Islamic democracy, but between democracy
and dictatorship” (2006a: 143–144). According to Shabestari, if the state
13
For essays on Shabestari, see Sadri (2001) and Vahdat (2000). For discussions of Kiyan, see
Jahanbakhsh (2001) and Mehdi Semati (2007).
Foody: Interiorizing Islam
613
takes on responsibility for propagating religion, “it will promote a particular interpretation of religion, since without some kind of interpretation,
the promotion of religion is impossible” (2006a: 146). Shabestari’s political critique is not only focused on the reality of multiple interpretations
of Islam, but significantly on the independence of the “ulama” (religious
scholars). He suggests that “the preservation of the independence of religion and the independence of the ‘ulama’ of religion, from the perspective of protecting and respecting religion, is an indisputable and definite
duty” (2006a: 147). Similarly to Soroush, Shabestari’s understanding of a
“democracy of Muslims” against “Islamic democracy” does not imply
that religious sentiments would not affect the political establishment, but
rather that religious authorities, namely the fuqaha (legal scholars),
would be disconnected from the state apparatus (2006a: 146–147).
Shabestari’s works are indebted to a tradition of German hermeneutics as well as Islamic sources. In his most important work, Hermeneutic,
Qur’an, and Sunna (Hirminutik, Kitab, va Sunnat), Shabestari argued
that the meaning of the text itself is hidden and only revealed through the
act of interpretation. This argument destabilizes claims to ultimate authority—such as those of the Islamic Republic—and admits a plurality of
possible interpretations. In addition, this reality of interpretative difference provides grounds for recognition of inter-religious difference,
though its more substantial aim is to allow space for competing and conflicting interpretations of Islam in the context of the Islamic Republic.
This argument is clearest in a roundtable discussion on “religious pluralism” (plurālīzm-i dīnī) later published in Shabestari’s Critique of the
Official Reading of Religion (Naqdi bar Qaraʾat-i Rasmi-yi Din). As evident
in that text, Shabestari differs from Soroush in that he shows little interest
in the Islamic Sufi or philosophical–mystical traditions—traditions that
may seem, or at least have been read by Euro-American scholars as, more
open to interiority and the language of religious experience. It was historically jurisprudence, in Shabestari’s reading, not Sufi approaches, that organized Islamic tradition by elucidating God’s commands and prohibitions
(2006b: 162). At the same time, he shares Soroush’s move to validate interior expressions of Islam as necessary for overcoming state oversight of
religious meaning and practice. Shabestari suggests that in recent history,
Islamic jurisprudence has failed to elucidate the true meaning of shariʿa. It
is entirely outdated in matters of politics and has forgotten that shariʿa,
properly understood, marks the practices that “nourish religious experience” (Shabestari 2006c: 420–421).
Shabestari bases this argument on the same Sunni scholar that appears
in Soroush’s writings, Muhammad al-Ghazali; however, rather than his
Deliverance from Error—a text that culminates in the affirmation of Sufi
614
Journal of the American Academy of Religion
disciplines—Shabestari looks to Ghazali’s Revival of the Religious Sciences,
an equally seminal text that remade Islamic jurisprudence (Jackson 2002;
Moosa 2005; Griffel 2009). Shabestari grounds his own argument in
Ghazali’s critique of jurisprudence: “Islamic jurisprudence ( fiqh) became
separated from religious experience and spirituality, the clarifying of God’s
orders and prohibitions turned into merely clarifying ‘forms of practices,’
and the connection between obeying God [on the one hand] and the religious care, the ultimate concern, and unconditional commandment of the
Muslim people [on the other] was severed; in the words of Ghazali, this
science [of Islamic jurisprudence] became merely worldly (dunyavī)”
(2006c: 421).
With the decline of jurisprudence, law is no longer the organizing principle of Islamic life, but rather it is adab—a term that may be translated as
etiquette or civility, but is most aptly understood as “that pedagogy that
results in the cultivation of a virtue and motivates all human practices. It is
both the education itself and the practical formations of norms for right
and exemplary conduct” (Moosa 2005: 209). Adab, the cultivation of a virtuous self, is the hallmark of Muslim practice: “when you open a book like
The Revival of the Religious Sciences, you see that from Ghazali’s perspective that which must be observed . . . are not the laws (qavānīn) of life, but
the adab of . . . life.” The gnostics asked, “What are the adab of commerce?
What are the adab of traveling? What are the adab of socializing? . . . They
use this term ‘adab’ in worship, social ethics, and in politics” (Shabestari
2006c: 419).
These kinds of practices are central—as in Soroush—not as a thing in
themselves, but to cultivate the interior religious life of the individual.
Inner faith (īmān) is not severed entirely from correct practice; rather,
Muslims during the time of Mohammad correctly understood God’s law
(qanūn) to mean submitting to the “orders of God” (hukm Allah) and
being cultivated through the discipline of devotion. These scholars, in contrast to today’s jurisprudents, argued that these conscientious practices of
the self were central to religiosity (Shabestari 2006c: 418).14 Echoing the
title of Ghazali’s own Revival of the Religious Sciences, Shabestari concludes:
“The most important criteria that we must attend to today is which kind of
life and which kind of practice and which kind of law is compatible with
reviving the religious experience of Muslims” (2006c: 419).
14
Despite this fact, as Barbara Metcalf has noted, historically the academic study of Islam has paid
little attention to the ways in with adab, as embodied practice, structured much of Muslim religious
and social life. She notes that modern and contemporary studies of Islam are seriously lacking
attention to adab discourses and suggests this as an important and substantive avenue for future
research (Metcalf 1984).
Foody: Interiorizing Islam
615
As a response to the legal authority of the Islamic Republic,
Shabestari’s goal is to highlight the extent to which embodied worship
(the focus of the Islamic Republic as it relates to correct action) is linked
to individual conscience rather than legal authority and enforcement.
Salvation, Shabestari suggests, stems from a close relationship with God
outside the confines of the state. Defining religion as “finding one’s path
toward the presence of God,” Shabestari argues this movement takes
place only in individual communication with God and never under the
authority or trusteeship of others (2006a: 151).
In this critique of purely formal jurisprudence, Shabestari obliquely
condemns the Islamic Republic’s assumption that Islamic jurisprudence
is central for cultivating religious life. Elsewhere, Shabestari does suggest
that rethinking Islamic jurisprudence is possible. While the completion
of such a project will demonstrate the “compatibility” of Islamic and
democratic principles, no true Islam can flourish under any sort of “trusteeship” responsible for the religious and moral activities of its citizens
(Shabestari 2006a: 151). The goal of Islamic practice—the cultivation of
the heart—is outside the jurists’ domain (Shabestari 2006a: 153).
Again, this reading both echoes and diverges from historical readings
of Ghazali. As Shabestari suggests, Ghazali did indeed draw heavily on
the concept of adab. The second section of his Revival of the Religious
Sciences addressed “Norms of Daily Life (al-ʿādat),” and focused there on
particular categories of adab, from ways of eating (kitāb ʿadab al-aql) to
imitating the manners of the prophet.15 More generally, Ghazali reconstructed adab as the “heart” of Islamic jurisprudence (Moosa 2005: 238).
Despite these similarities, Ghazali understood the place of law and jurisprudence differently from Shabestari as well. It is significant that
Shabestari does not note the necessity of linking Islamic orders and prohibitions to government in Ghazali’s work. As Ebrahim Moosa suggests,
“the ethics of conduct is central to Muslim salvation practices . . . for
Ghazali, there was a dialogical relationship between macro and micro politics, namely, between the governance of the polis and the governance of
the body” (2005: 214). Ghazali’s text imagines an interlocutor asking
“Why have you appended jurisprudence to secular [worldly] sciences and
grouped jurisprudents among secular [worldly] scholars?”16 Intriguingly,
15
For an outline of Ghazali’s The Revival of Religious Sciences with links to completed and ongoing
translations of various chapters, see “al-Ghazali Website,” http://www.ghazali.org/site/ihya.htm,
accessed December 31, 2012.
16
Nabih Amin Faris’ 1966 translation of “The Book of Knowledge,” the only English translation
available, renders the term “ilm al-donya” as “secular sciences” (see The Book of Knowledge: Being a
Translation with Notes of The Kitāb al-“Ilm of al-Ghazzāli’s Iḥ yā”’ Ulūm al-Dīn [Lahore, Pakistan:
Sh. Muhammad Ashraf 1966: 40]); here, I revise his translation as “worldly” (a more literal
616
Journal of the American Academy of Religion
and not entirely within Shabestari’s aims in citing the Revival of the
Religious Sciences, Ghazali’s reply is not merely that the role of jurisprudence is limited, but also that jurisprudence is integral to the practice of
Muslims in the world. He suggest “It is the jurisprudent . . . who has the
knowledge of the rules of government and the methods of mediation
between the people whenever, because of their greed, they contend . . . I
declare that jurisprudence is also connected with religion, not directly but
[indirectly] through [the affairs of] this world, because this world is the
preparation for the hereafter and there is no religion without it” (Ghazali
1962).17 Shabestari, in short, echoes Ghazali’s earlier critique of jurisprudence—it is a danger when it does not know its place—but at the same
time stays silent on the role of jurisprudence in organizing this-worldly life,
specifically politics.18
The incorporation of religious experience into contemporary Muslim
writings marks a transformation of Islamic discourse, the crafting of new
models of interiority and new economies of self, religious authority, and
governmental organization. Scholars of religion have traced the impact
that models of mystical and religious experience made in colonial and
postcolonial contexts (Sharf 1995; King 1999). The debates within the
Islamic Republic of Iran add a complicated element to this study of global
religious interaction; in short, the remaking of Islam in Iran takes place
not only in light of the pervasive dominance of Euro-American categories, but under the influence of the legal transformations of the Islamic
Republic itself. It is significant that Iranian studies scholarship on
Soroush largely affirms Soroush’s dismissal of annihilation and turn to
individual liberation. Indeed, the discourses of annihilation that Soroush
reinterprets for individual agency are linked to antidemocratic movements within Iran, including the writings of Ayatollah Khomeini as well
as those of contemporary scholars who support the Islamic Republic’s
system (Vahdat 2002). Some prominent studies of Iranian Islam critique
religious justifications of democracy as such, suggesting that Soroush and
those like him do not go far enough in remaking the place of Islam in
Iranian political and social life (Mirsepassi 2010: 87–88). Other scholars,
however, suggest that the familiarity of liberal and secular forms should
not in itself discount the validity of nonliberal Islams, which for most
Muslims differ greatly from both the practices of the Islamic Republic
translation) in order to avoid any anachronistic assumption about either political or philosophical
secularism from Euro-American traditions.
17
For a discussion of the opposition between the “this-worldly” and “other-worldly” in Ghazali, see
Garden (2005).
18
For a detailed discussion of Ghazali’s critique of jurisprudence, see Gianotti (2011).
Foody: Interiorizing Islam
617
and the critiques of its reformist opponents (Mahmood 2006). Similar
concerns led Richard King to look to subaltern studies approaches to
Hindu traditions in South Asia, hoping that “highlighting the ways in
which the anti-colonial discourses often inverted rather than displaced
Orientalist motifs, tropes and stereotypes” would enable “us to see that
the focus on a select group of individuals as representative icons of an essentialized ‘India’ itself effaces the subaltern voice” (1999: 206).
Regardless of whether the religious–political interpretations suggested
by Soroush and others are to be affirmed or critiqued, it does behoove us,
as Schmidt suggests, to enter these liberal worlds “to see what negotiations
animated these constructs in the first place” (2003: 275). As I suggested
earlier, analysis of Iranian Islam often overlooks the overwhelming presence of the contemporary legal regimes in which Muslim contestations
over orthodoxy take place.19 Whether liberal or authoritarian, modern
Muslim understandings of Islam are organized within specifically modern
legal systems (Asad 2003: 235–236). While for Friedrich Schleiermacher,
“the notion of religious experience provided new grounds upon which to
defend religion against secular and scientific critique” (Sharf 1998: 98), in
the Iranian context, it performs an analogous though distinctly different
function: to organize an arena of religiosity that is untouchable by state law
and the Islamic Republic’s governance of religious action.
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