BOOK
REVIEW An appeal for
empire Theology of
Discontent by Hamid Dabashi
Reviewed by Dmitry Shlapentokh
This book is now in a second edition, and
deservedly so. Theology of Discontent is
one of the best accounts of the intellectual
framework of Iran's Islamic Revolution of 1979.
Hamid Dabashi, an eminent specialist in
Iranian studies from Columbia University,
following a sort of romanticized version of
post-modernism, states that a
philosophy based on a new interpretation of Islam
was able to permeate the minds of Iranians and was
the prime engine for change. Discarding
socioeconomic or political reasons for discontent,
he sees the revolution as caused primarily by a
new vision of an ideal society that had been
shaped by several key Iranian intellectuals.
In Dabashi's view, this dream about the
ideal society is a myth. This statement is hardly
novel. The assumption that revolution is a sort of
attempt to materialize the myth is quite popular
in European and Russian thought and has often been
employed by conservative historians of the major
modern European revolutions, eg, French and
Russian, to demonstrate the basic unworkability of
revolutions. The attempt to create the ideal
society usually led, in the view of these
historians, to the opposite result: a nightmare of
tyranny and terror.
Dabashi has a
different reading of the myth. Following the
French sociologist Emile Durkheim (1858-1917), he
sees religion, and myth enshrined in religion, as
the glue that holds society together. It is also
an inspirational force for change. The myth should
be invented and reinvented endlessly to move
history forward, Iranian history in this case.
While the author certainly has the right
to his own interpretation of the myth and to
confine himself to the purely intellectual roots
of revolution, he seems to have one problem. He
tries to emphasize the indigenous Iranian/Muslim
roots of the ideology of the thinkers he discusses
with few exceptions. In most of the cases he fails
to recognize that under the surface quasi-medieval
appeal to Islam, one can often discover modern
socialist thought. For example, the late Iranian
ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini praised the virtuous
rulers of the past who lived in absolute poverty.
For Dabashi, this sort of ruler was the
embodiment of the true Islamic tradition, whereas
the last shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, with his
opulence was a decisive break with it. Actually,
the opposite is true. Throughout pre-modern
history - in the Middle East and elsewhere - it
was taken for granted that rulers lived in
god-like conditions and the masses suffered in
poverty. Only modern socialists spread the idea
that rulers should pay attention to the condition
of the lower classes and live in simplicity.
The book as a whole deals with
pre-revolutionary ideology, but it would have been
logical if, at least in the concluding chapter,
the author had dealt with post-revolutionary Iran,
to demonstrate the revolutionary regime. The
revolutionary ideology in Iran - as in all great
revolutions - has a universal appeal and an
ostentatious break with the social, political, and
geopolitical arrangements of the past.
It
broke with the nationalistic and, it is
emphasized, anti-Islamic regime of the shah, who
tried to find his legacy in the mighty Achaemenian
Iranian state, not in social justice and worldwide
Shi'ite revolution.
At time went on, the
revolutionary regime underwent a
"national-Bolshevist" transmogrification, if one
may use a term from the Russian Revolution. The
dream of spreading Shi'ite justice globally was
nicely blended with primordial Iranian
nationalism. It is not incidental that ideological
idols destroyed in early revolutionary discourse
have re-emerged in a new context.
This
was, for example, the case with the Achaemenian
era, the greatest pre-Islamic empire in Iran. The
last shah appealed to this era to maintain Iranian
difference from nearby Arabs but also to emphasize
Iran nationalism and a mighty state.
At
the beginning of the revolutionary era in Iran,
Khomeini blasted the shah's attention to
non-Islamic despotic rule. He saw him as a ruler
who cared only about power and splendor, not about
people. Khomeini spared no words - as Dabashi
notes - to condemn the celebration of the 2,500th
anniversary of the Achaemenian Empire.
At
the same time, as the response to the recent US
movie 300 indicates, the Achaemenian Empire
has been celebrated again as the great epoch in
the history of the Iranian people. And it thus
offered no contradiction between the ruling
Shi'ite ideology and the nationalistic glory of
the distant past.
Thus the revolutionary
ideology in Iran, following the path of other
revolutionary ideologies and regimes, returned to
its nationalistic roots in a dialectic negation of
negation. At the beginning, revolutions appeal to
social justice and have global appeal; in the end,
they return to justifying the nationalistic
animus, the might of the state, which they had
discarded. And even if these ideologies preserve
some early elements, they are not of much appeal
for worldwide revolution but are actually an
appeal for empire.
Theology of
Discontent: The Ideological Foundation of the
Islamic Revolution in Iran by Hamid Dabashi.
Transaction Publishers, 2006. ISBN-10: 1412805163,
US$40, 706 pages.
Dmitry
Shlapentokh, PhD, is associate professor of
history, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences,
Indiana University South Bend. He is author of
East Against West: The First Encounter - The Life
of Themistocles (2005).
(Copyright
2007 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
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eg, French and
Russian, to demonstrate the basic unworkability of
revolutions. The attempt to create the ideal
society usually led, in the view of these
historians, to the opposite result: a nightmare of
tyranny and terror. 
