This paper explores sites within the Islamic Republic of Iran that lay claim to reason (ʿaql) as integral to Islamic modernity. I focus on the ways in which scholastic journals of the Islamic ḥawza, such as Critique and Perspective (Naqd va Naẓar), The Light of Learning (Nūr-i ʿIlm), Islamic Government (Ḥukūmat-i Islamī) and others, express a singular interest in reason as necessary for coming to terms with specifically modern problems. This paper draws on recent work in the study of Iranian Islam that has situated Iranian discussions of Islam within broader currents of modernity (Mirsepassi 2011; Matsunaga 2009; Dabashi 2008; Rajaee 2007; Jahanbakhsh 2002; Mirsepassi 2000) and extends these arguments to focus on the local and global imbrications of Iranian constructions of modern reason.
Academic studies of Islam often distinguish the operations of the ʿulamaʾ from the activities of secular intellectuals; in short, while religious scholars hold unreasoned or unassailable commitments, secular intellectuals publically debate knowledge. Only recently have anthropologists of Islam such as Talal Asad and others retorted that Islamic practices of offering judgments should not be understood uniformly as failure to allow reasoned debate. I do not suggest that the place of reason in the hawza debates mirrors the commitment to public reason articulated by either Iranian intellectuals or secular critics elsewhere. One cannot ignore either the history of Shiʿi commitments to reason as constitutive of humanity’s relation to revelation or the claims to authority embedded in discourses of Shiʿi Iranian ʿulamaʾ. I argue, however, that debates over reason in the hawza demonstrate that the arguments of classically-trained Islamic scholars are marked by novel readings of the relationship between rationality, scholarship, and modernity.
Here, I compare hawza journals to the productions of Iranian Muslim intellectuals and highlight the ways in which both projects define their engagements—specifically with ruptures they understand as modern—as requiring a reasoning subject. Both projects are marked by a singular interested in the rationality of the scholar and both discourses suggest that this rationality must be divorced in some measure from the learned traditions of the past. The quality of the present demands a radical redefinition of the practice of even Islamic reasoning. In this sense a specifically modern notion of reason has become embedded in the intellectual and theoretical apparatus of the Iranian Islamic scholars and their attempts to theorize not only the Iranian political situation, but Islamic knowledge in general.
