Conclusion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
Societies go through critical phases where crises in their prevailing collective thought, perception or world outlook, having reached the culmination of their gestation period, lead to shifts in thought, belief and paradigms. There are no scientific rules determining the duration of this gestation period of crises. Before and after the shift becomes operational and institutionalized, different discourses continue to compete with one another. Until the ascending discourse transforms its ideas and perceptions into laws and policies and even after it succeeds to do so, it will be nudged and challenged by the ideas that preceded it and held its political realization in check. The reshaping of the prevailing collective thought in Iran, triggered by the historical encounter between modernity and religion dating back to the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1906, is still underway. The intellectual production of those segments of society involved in this encounter has gone through a clear process of crystallization. Ambiguous understandings of terms and concepts have distilled and sharpened. An idealistic, voluntaristic and cavalier acceptance of ready-made formulas not necessarily corresponding to the socio-economic and religious realities of Iran have given way to more nuanced, and therefore realistic, synthesis and analysis.
In the process of this historical encounter, two loosely labelled outlooks – anti-religious modernists and religious anti-modernists – have pretended to be interested in participating in the dialogue within the main body of society, sometimes latent and sometimes overt, on modernity and Islam.
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- Information
- Superstition as Ideology in Iranian PoliticsFrom Majlesi to Ahmadinejad, pp. 293 - 306Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011