نشریه علوم سیاسی
سال دوازدهم شماره 2 (پیاپی 46، تابستان 1388)

The paper, first, briefly studies Iran’s 20 Year Perspective Document, the challenges it is facing with, and its status in relation with the Software Movement. Since the existing capacities have a key role in the realization of the document, the existing situation of Iran and some neighboring countries are studied next. The result is that the realization of the goals behind the document, concerning the achievement of first economic and scientific rank among the neighboring countries and the ones in Southeast Asia seems very difficult because of population problems and the resulting unemployment, and the infrastructural problems in relation with education, science, and technology. The solution to this problem for us is to make the rate of growth exponential and non-linear so that we can achieve the goals in the document with respect to the existing situation in Iran and the countries mentioned in the document.

After 9/11, a democracy discourse replaced the Taliban which had previously turned into a dominant discourse through creating an antagonistic relationship against Mojahedin and marginalizing them. The democracy discourse created its identity through articulating signifiers such as “people”, “freedom”, “human rights”, “women’s rights”, “campaign against terrorism”, and “fighting against growing opium poppies”, i.e. through negating the identity of the Taliban which had articulated signifiers such as “Sharia”, “theocracy”, “security”, “limiting women”, “growing opium poppies”, etc. After about a decade of the life of democracy in Afghanistan, the most important limits it is facing are discursive ones. In other words, the meanings this discourse attributed to signifiers such “people”, “human rights”, “freedom”, “women”, etc. are not easily acceptable by the traditional society of Afghanistan. The competing discourses, Mojahedin and Taliban, are barriers for the hegemony of democracy in Afghanistan.

Central Asia is among areas which have gained an increasingly important position in regional and international relations after the collapse of Soviet Union in 1991. Now it is considered as one of most important regional subsystems for Iran. The foreign policy of Islamic Republic of Iran in the region, on the one hand, can benefit from the opportunities and cooperation on the basis of convergence in political, economic, and cultural domains, and on the other hand, it is faced with challenges and threats due to some divergence factors. The result of these two trends has always been influential on the foreign policy of Iran in Central Asia.

The oil field in the Persian Gulf and the surrounding countries is the biggest oil and gas resource of the world which contains 40 % of the world’s natural gas reserves and 61.5 % of the world’s oil reserves. Among them, Iran which has 28.13 trillion cube meters of natural gas (15.5 % of world reserves) and 137.5 billion barrel of oil (11.5 % of world reserves) is the most important country in the region with respect to fossil energy reservoir. Thus, it is focus of international energy developments. Iran’s geographically suitable position and the increasing economic growth of markets in Indian Peninsula, Eastern Asia, and Europe has increased their need to energy, specifically natural gas and prepared the ground for building natural gas pipes from Iran to consumption market.

In the contemporary thinking, when speaking of the relationship between ethics and politics, various questions may arise: Is there a objectivity-interaction relationship between ethics and politics? Will ethics be a subordinate to and an instrument for politics? Are ethics and politics contradictory, or two separate domains? Contemplating over Mulla Sadra’s thoughts and the theoretical foundations of ethics and politics in transcendent philosophy, one can give a positive answer to the questions of whether ethics will be subordinate to politics, or there will be a unity-interaction relationship between ethics and politics. Thus, the paper concentrates on these two questions. It seems that, concerning the relationship between ethics and politics, Mulla Sadra has chosen two hypotheses of “final-instrumental” and “unity-interaction” among the various common hypotheses. He has also created an inseparable relationship between ethics and the common and transcendent politics through proposing Asfar Arba-e [the four journeys] on the basis of Tawhid [oneness of god].

There were fundamental differences in political philosophy and culture between Islamic and westem-Christian or European civilization in the period up to c. 1500, notably concerning the nature of the political community, of religious law and of the mode of political discourse. These differences are mainly rooted in social rationality, public opinion, and notable works by philosophers, lawyers, and theologians. An important point in that era was that Europe was open to Greco-Roman influences and thus developed, as Islam did not, a notion of the legitimate secular state. Finally, the writer comes to the conclusion that through the passage of time the gap between Islam and the Christian West increased and, instead of converging toward each other in the course of modernity, each culture went its own way and distanced from the other.

“Islam, Tradition, and Modern State”, written by Seyyed Ali Mir-Mousavi, is to deconstruct Shiite Ijtihad through discourse analysis, perform a typological study of Shiite political thought, and discuss the factors of incompatibility between the traditional political thought and the requirements of modern states. The most important criticisms are related to methodologies applied in this book: using inconsistent and incompatible methods, their incorrect application to Muslim scholars such as Al-Jahiz, and finally the inappropriate use of these methods. According the discourse analysis, there can be different readings based on different conditions and not all can be used simultaneously. In addition, discourse analysis is not compatible. Concerning the content of the book, too, classifying the discourses into traditional, reformist, and critical and some of the references in the book need to be considered seriously.