Document Type : Original Article
Authors
Faculty Member/ Faculty of Social Sciences/ University of Tehran
Abstract
In this paper, first of all, I introduce the mosque and its political role in the dynamics of the 1979 Iranian Revolution as the key research problem of this project. Then, I will raise the main question of this paper as follows: How can the politics of the Iranian mosque can be studied? Then, after reviewing the scholarly literature on the Iranian revolution, I will criticize the most commonly accepted assumptions about the political role of the mosque in the dynamics of the 1979 revolution: 1) the mosque-network was less under the direct suppression of the Shah’s regime compared to liberal and secular oppositional organizations. As a result, the mosque and the Islamists could play a more active role in the oppositional politics against the regime; 2) the mosque-network and the Shi’i clerics constituted a homogeneous oppositional block which was completely unified against the dominant political power. I move on to argue that the theoretical foundations of these assumptions derive from the modernization and the ideological frameworks and their essentialist understanding of the political role of Islam in modern life. Through the reassessment of these frameworks, I will propose the social processes model as an alternative theoretical framework for analyzing the historical transformations of the mosque network in Iran and its political role in the 1979 Revolution.
Keywords
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