Democracy in Iran

Compatibility of Islam and democracy has widely been discussed especially after the 9/11 attacks. At the center of these debates, a country is often on the spot: Iran. Lately, the post-election protests in 2009 summer were much debated in the Western media, posing questions about mass mobilizations among younger Iranians. Ali Mirsepassi invites us to read the mass political mobilization over the “missing votes” within the broader historical context in which the continuing struggle for democracy against both Islamist and secularist authoritarian ideologies over the decades. Therefore, according to the author, today’s massive movement for democratic change is hardly surprising. Indeed, “like similar movements in the history of Iran, it is represented by a cross-section of Iranians from the poor to the middle class, the religious to the secular, the lay people to the clergy, and so on” (p. xi), and therefore, it is well embedded in the culture of public protest in modern Iran.

Mirsepassi’s book calls to re-think the historical trajectory of modern Iran to understand complex relationship between Islam and democracy. In the opening chapters, the author criticizes the Eurocentric notion of monolithic modernity by suggesting a nuanced conception of multiple modernities in which multiple forms of rationality, secularism and cultural expression are analyzed. Mirsepassi warns against the traps of culturalism, which views Islam and democracy as incompatible, within the Eurocentric model of modernity by pointing out historical-temporal structures of Muslim populated countries including economies, technologies, populations, organizations, languages and discourses. The author also engages with oft-cited analyses of Talal Asad on secularism. Mirsepassi questions Asad’s description of secularism as a specific political tradition in Europe, claiming that the politics of secularism have become a significant part of national democratic struggles in Islamic societies.

Democracy in Modern Iran is a good introduction to reflect upon relationship between Islam and democracy. I hope that this work will be followed by more concrete institutional analyses, ethnographies, and quantitative studies alike so that Mirsepassi’s analytical approach bears illustrative fruits in future.