The Political Culture of Traditional Ulema in the Era of Constitutional Revolution in Iran

The culture is consisted of beliefs, values and emotions. On the one hand, cultural systems are products of variety of human beliefs and acts. On the other hand, these cultural systems constrain other beliefs and acts in several domains. Politics is one of the most important domains in which culture plays a determinative role. Durable influences of cultural factors on political positions and orientations can be studied in the framework of the concept of political culture. It is tried in this article to investigate the political culture of "traditional ulama" as an independent political stream. There are a few works that consider this political stream independently and in most of the cases, positions of this stream are considered in relation to Sheykh Fazlolah Nouri’s advocates. The written works which belong to this stream are so scant. In this article, two booklets of this stream are scrutinized which belong to Shekh Abolhasan Najafi Marandi and Mohammadhossein Tabrizi, intellectual elites of the stream. The conceptual framework which is used in this investigation is based on a pattern synthetized of Gabriel Almond and Bingham Powell’s work. Other works which some parts of their consequences are incorporated in this pattern are Lucian Pye, Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel’s works. The method used in this research is thematic content analysis which integrates the qualitative considerations along quantitative. Open and axial coding technics are applied in different levels of investigation. The results shows that similar pattern of political culture is dominant on both considered booklets. It is followed that value foundation of both intellectuals is “authoritarian”; in terms of political and cultural capacities, they are “monopolistic”; and the item of their political position is “protesting”.