Authoritarian Modernity and the Emergence of the Political Islam in Iran with an Emphasis on the Devotees of Islam

Following the Iran-Russia wars and the Iranians' awareness of their backwardness, pursuing the path of achieving political, military and economic power over the West through modernization and socio-political transformation, became an urgent goal in the minds of the Iranian elites. The Constitutional Revolution was a manifestation of the realization of this goal. But the intellectual-political debates over the constitutionalism and the tensions between the ruling forces, as well as the parties and currents within the constitutional system and the regions, delayed the original goal of progress and led the authoritarian mind of the Iranian intellectuals to authoritarian modernity. Following the October Revolution in Russia, the groundwork was laid for the emergence of authoritarian modernism in Iran with the support of Britain. Authoritarian modernism, with its ostensible understanding of Western modernity and its romantic conception of nationalism, led to policies and actions that, in addition to inciting the Islamist resistance, failed to achieve its goals. The rise of political Islam in this period, of which the devotees of Islam were prominent representatives, was in opposition to the politics of authoritarian modernity. Using a descriptive-analytical research method, this article seeks to explain the relationship between the authoritarian modernism and the emergence of political Islam with a focus on the ideas of the devotees of Islam in Iran.