Journal of World Sociopolitical Studies

Abstract

Abstract The anti-American inclination of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s foreign policy-making is well established, and the bitter aspects of the two nation’s history well known. However, to assert a simple causal relationship between history and foreign-policy structure portrays the Islamic Republic’s anti-Americanism as inevitable, eternal and unrelated to actors’ agency. This article disputes this simple structural understanding by drawing on Greener’s method of applying path-dependency theory to political science. We first identify the ideas and structure of revolutionary Iran, benefiting in particular from the complementary insights of postcolonial theory. Following, we examine US policy choices in the Islamic Republic’s formative period of 1978–79—specifically those related to human rights, the shah and direct US intervention—and how these were perceived and acted upon in Tehran. Our findings indicate that American actions and Iranian decisions both influenced the establishment of a path-dependent process of perception and perpetration that continues until today. Successive Iranian governments have asserted that America ignores Iranian’s human rights, supports their enemies, and pursues direct intervention, while successive US government actions, motivated by Iranian counter-actions, have generated ample evidence to validate such claims. This can explain how a spiral of distrust emerged between the two nations.

Abstract This research sheds light on what has constituted and defined Iran’s post-revolutionary political identity and provides insights into its development with important socio-political implications. In order to understand the configuration and the evolution of post-revolutionary identity in Iran, we examined Hajj Messages issued by Iran’s Supreme Leader through a content analysis within the framework of a threefold typological model of identity advanced by the authors: empiricistic, rationalistic, and idealistic. The passages selected from the Supreme Leader’s Hajj Messages are classified into the above-mentioned three categories based on the model. Results indicate that in the post-revolutionary Iran, a rationalism that inherits the doctrines of anti-despotism, anti-colonialism, and return to Islam prevails. It is also observed that the post-revolutionary identity of Iran has both empiricist and idealist factors, in the narrations of which the rituals of Hajj and the history of prophets are underscored respectively. This research also concerns ebbs and flows in the process of identity development in post-revolutionary Iran. Whilst the rationalist factor keeps stable and is gradually strengthening its preponderance, idealism is ebbing away and empiricism is flowing in.

Abstract Modern brutality, which found its culmination in using weapons of mass destruction (WMD) against humanity, is the dark side of the principal teachings of the Enlightenment. The great thinkers of the Enlightenment, blaming religion as the main source of violence, removed God from the center of Western political and social thought to replace it with human. Although they were not conscious of the outcomes of their philosophy, in the course of time, it made modern societies more power-hungry and less accountable for their actions. To investigate this issue, relying on Theodor Adorno and other critics, the rudiments of the Enlightenment will first be analyzed. Then, looking at the history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this article investigates the way in which militarization, and its peak, the atomic bomb, became an unintended outcome of the Enlightenment. In the next step, we will discuss the reactions of American Churches to the bomb to examine how differently a God-centered perspective may act against using or proliferating WMD. This leads to the role that the belief in God may play in increasing the sense of accountability in man’s social and political behavior. The article concludes that based on historical evidence, there is no indication that a human-centered model is more immune from violence than a God-centered one.
 

Abstract This study attempts to assess the different ways through which Islam as a religion can impact politics. In fact, the notion that is collectively labeled as Islam and its re-interpretation as an escalating presence of religion in politics in today's world has deep layers. To distinguish a variety of these layers, each with different characteristics, they should be defined, and the type of contributions they can make to politics should be examined one by one. Mixing up the layers with each other and employing characteristics of one for another can result, and in fact has resulted in many misunderstandings in political discussions. In order to show how to distinguish the layers and how to find the dominant layer of religion in each case, the role played by Islam in three important Islamic countries: Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey will be examined. Comparing and contrasting these cases, this paper will conclude that only through identifying layers of religion in force and distinguishing the dominant ones can the actual role of religion be examined in each case study.