Public Religiosity and the Struggle for Socio-Economic Justice: A Theology for Mobilizing the Poor?

There exists an emerging body of scholarship on public religiosity in contemporary Iran, analyzing the phenomenon in relation to the 1979 revolution and post-revolutionary social and political developments. Much less examined is the relationship between public religion and socio-economic life, and the (existing as well as potential) intersection between the public expressions of faith and the rising demands for social and economic justice. To examine this relationship, it is constructive to distinguish between charity work and popular mobilization as two distinct strategies employed by faith-based groups for negotiating economic justice. The latter approach, adopted by a range of religiously-oriented leftist intellectuals and organizations throughout the 1970s proved to be effective in the course of the formation and rise of the revolutionary movement. The synthesis of public religiosity and egalitarian ideals played an important role in mobilizing the economically disenfranchised masses, and this mobilization, in turn, compelled the new revolutionary state to take measures for creating a more equitable society. Since the early 1990s, however, the Islamic Republic has gradually moved away from its early pro-poor commitments, as evidenced by the various steps taken under the governments of Hashemi-Rafsanjani, Khatami, and Ahmadinejad toward economic liberalization and deregulation. While this shift has created the need to attend once again to the issue of economic justice, we have witnessed a decline in economic justice-oriented mobilizational activities by religious groups in post-revolutionary Iran. To investigate the causes of this decline, my paper examines a variety of factors including the effective appropriation by Islamist forces of the pro-poor discourses of religious and secular left throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, the difficulty of using the mobilizational capacities of religion to challenge the apparatus of a religious state, and the proliferation of charity work and religiously-oriented charities in Iran since the mid- and late-1990s. The paper further argues that the continuation of economic liberalization policies under the government of Rohani, and the unsustainability of the charity approach for realizing economic justice, will inevitably necessitate a revival of the mobilizational approach. In conclusion, a case is made that by articulating a contextually grounded and culturally situated discourse of socio-political and socio-economic justice, a radical and reformed Shi’i liberation theology can serve a vital role in linking together economically-oriented collective actions (i.e. labor union activism, and protests against price hikes and workers layoffs) and activism for democracy, citizenship rights, and gender equality in Iran.