Iranian Modernization and Issues of Modernity

This panel was compiled by the Conference Program Team from independently submitted paper proposals.


Presentations

by /

Strategy mapping, as developed by Kaplan and Norton (1993) through the “Balanced Scorecard” methodology, explicitly defines the cause and effect relationships between objectives, measures, and initiatives through all levels of an organization. Since two decades, this strategic outlook on organization management has been implemented for reforms in many public administrations and local governments (the Spanish Health Care, Municipalities in South Africa, etc.).
This paper uses the map strategy methodology in order to assess different phases of pre-revolutionary modernization processes in Iran from 1906 to 1979. In dialogue with Foran’s work on social transformation in Iran (1993), I propose a modelization of main reform processes in the 20th century through four dimensions: structure of social relation, governance, production system and strategic objectives. The paper discusses how the strategic mapping methodology applied to the assessment of governement and public services management help us understand the processes and failures of pre-revolutionary reform movement, and which lessons can be drawn.

by /

In the aftermath of the 1906 Constitutional Revolution, a sense of a ‘new time’ and ‘newness’ emerged in Iran and a cluster of temporal concepts like “new Iran,” “new epoch,” “new age,” etc. entered into the everyday discourse. This sense of a new time crystallized into a newly defined relationship of ‘past,’ ‘present,’ and ‘future’ and a distinct temporalization emerged. The emerged sense of ‘new time’ was reinforced and institutionalized with the changing of the calendar in 1911 and 1925. In 1911, parliament passed a law through which the solar Jalālī calendar was recognized as the official administrative calendar of Iran alongside the Islamic lunar Hijrī calendar, which was used for the reckoning of religious rituals. The Jalālī calendar of 1911 had Iranian, Islamic, Arabic, and Mongolic elements. In 1925, legislators purged the Arabic and Mongolic elements of the Jalālī calendar, and at this stage the Mongolic sediments in the Iranian calendar were totally expelled. Although the Islamic origin of the calendar, which was the migration of the Prophet Muhammad to Medina, did not change, through changing the Arabic names of the months to the Persian names – and the adoption of the solar-Iranian 365-day year instead of the lunar-Islamic 354-day year – the calendar’s nature was transformed to a more Iranian one. These fundamental changes in the calendar’s elements bridged the recently emerged new sense of time, which was an “individualistic definition” as opposed to cosmological time, which has an “independent existence” from humans, is related to the movement of the sun, moon, and the planets, and is expressed chronologically as serial instants. This changing of the calendar’s elements did not happen straightforwardly, and was accompanied by lots of debates and contestations, which reflected different views and plans for the future in the pro-Constitutional Revolution time. This paper investigates the relationship of the emergent conceptions of new time after the Constitutional Revolution and the two stages of the calendar’s alteration in 1911 and 1925.

by /

Feminist critiques of modernity in Iran have provided a rich array of discussions on the intersections of gender relations and the politics of modernity. Tracing the cultural labour performed by gender and sexuality in the making of Iranian modernity, these studies have made important contributions to a critical understanding of the shifting debates around identity that have occurred since the encounter with colonial modernity, as well as the ways in which European ideas about modernity have been selectively appropriated and rejected by both ‘modernizing’ and conservative or Islamist nationalist movements. Despite their contributions, these studies remain limited to the extent that they critique modernity as merely a discursive construct. Offering a culturalist critique that primarily conceptualizes gender and sexuality as tropes and markers in the politics of making and negotiating modernity, this body of literature has neglected the implications of contemporary transformations in global capitalism on cultural production in the Iranian context, resulting in a dehistoricized understanding of modernity.

In addressing this gap, this paper will attempt to put extant feminist critiques of Iranian modernity in conversation with the growing body of literature on capitalist modernity. The latter has emphasized, first, the historically contingent and nationally-specific trajectories of capitalist development, and second, that these specific trajectories are themselves embedded within and mediated by the international context of global capitalism. Seen in this way, the making of modernity and the development of social, economic, cultural and ideological forms in Iran has – far from occurring in isolation – been fundamentally shaped by the ongoing encounter with Western capitalism and has been international in both origin and substance. In this paper, I argue for the need to expand existing feminist critiques of Iranian modernity to specify the role that gender has played both as determinant and determined in pre- and post-revolutionary configurations of capitalist modernity in Iran, as well as to examine the shifting ways in which this dynamic has been mediated by the ‘international’. The paper aims thus to sketch out a theoretical framework for uncovering the complex ways in which gender tropes and discourses mediate capitalist modernity in Iran.

by /

This study seeks to re-evaluate the Iranian intellectuals' position towards modernity. Drawing on Rumi’s anecdote of the elephant in the dark room, I have argued that, ever since the Constitutional Revolution, the Iranian intelligentsia has been constantly forced to put off engagement with the philosophical discourse of modernity. As a result of this indecision, the Iranian society has repeatedly fluctuated between blind imitation and mindless hostility towards European modernity. These mood swings, however, have not impeded the importation of technology into Iran, which has thrown the country into an intellectual crisis. Presently, Iran is a “modernoid”, a Frankensteinian society with state-of-the-art communication capabilities, nuclear plants and breakthroughs in stem-cell research alongside human rights violation, tribal dogma, sectarian strife and theocratic despotism. Assuming a proper stance towards Modernity still remains Iran’s most ubiquitous issue while an alarmingly distorted mental image of modernity still persists, as if it were an elephant presented to them in a dark room.
A well-meditated response to the philosophy of Modernity, on behalf of Iranian intellectuals, is so long overdue that the whole question has lost topicality. The deconstruction of binary oppositions such as tradition/modernity and East/West in contemporary critical thought has led to contemplating the crises in modernity and identifying the dialectic in Enlightenment thought from a postmodern stance. I have, thus, concluded that the dark seeds of a lopsided modernity have sprouted into structures much more vacuous and monstrous than Adorno and Horkheimer could have ever imagined. On their path to ‘progress’, Iranians have stepped into the muddy paddle of positivism and scientism; its cultural aftermath. Iranian modernity stands where Europe did a century ago. It is, therefore, crucial for the fourth generation of Iranian intelligentsia to take heed of Critical Theory's -- specifically the Frankfurt School's-- critique of Enlightenment thought, Positivism, Scientism, Capitalism, and Culture Industry so that Iran can find a detour from the horrors that befell modernized Europe in the twentieth century.