نشریه سیاست پژوهی ایرانی
سال دوم شماره 4 (پیاپی 6، زمستان 1394)

The aim of establishing government, religiously speaking, is to use political power for achieving high ambitions of the conspicuous religion such as justice and institutionalization of purely Islamic culture in the community. But facing such sacred aim, there are damages and challenges that jeopardize achievement of the aims concerned and this is something of great concern for the supreme leader and founder of the Islamic Republic; among the other things, recognition and analysis of cultural damages become doubly important thanks to the approach adopted by religious government. A review over the most important worries of Imam Khomeini (ra) that were raised in his blessed lifetime with a pathological look can help us preserve the religious government because he with his intuition, vigilance, recognition and courage explored introduction and revelation of damages and suggested strategies. This article tries to explore cultural damages which, if not given important consideration, can threaten the religious government, keep it away from achievement of aims and ideals and pave the ground for restoration of religious doctrines and their gradual domination. In other words, emerging damages of culture can be the most important and serious damages because they can threaten foundation of government and metamorphosis occurs.

Religion of Islam, after being established, could abruptly found the wonderful civilization in the universe in such a way that have other civilizations including western civilization be indebted to itself. While paying attention to spiritual and material dimensions of civilizations and criticizing western civilization and underlining its uni-dimensional and material aspect, Imam Khomeini called Islamic civilization as the most exhaustive civilization that has a spirit replete with faith and where this spirit flows across all of its organs. On the other hand, Imam underscored the spiritual aspect and man-making capacity of Islamic civilization as its most important element.

This article tries to describe and elucidate political thought of Imam Khomeini (ra) and in order to make processes of freedom, democracy and secularism as he had in his mind. No doubt, his ideas are broad-based, integrated and logical and their elements are organically related to one another. Considering political development is one of the approaches to attain typical community concerned to Imam (ra). What is accepted is to pay attention to democracy and approval of what the majority believes in the ideas ruling over the regime. Founder of Islamic Republic of Iran by expressing that he is not opt to impose something on people of Iran, nor are Islam and Prophet (s) permitted to do so referred to likely similarity of his concerned democracy to the western type of democracy and clarified: “the democracy we want to establish is not available in west. Democracy of Islam is more complete than that of the west. “Category of freedom as primary right of mankind has been accepted in this government. Imam Khomeini (ra) believed: “There is freedom in Islam for all walks of life. Basis is national freedom and independence.” Of course, he made it clear that: “Freedom remains limited according to law; freedom ceases to mean that whoever says whatever he wishes to say.” Islamic Republic is a government based on freedom and democracy in the framework of Islam. In secularism, the followers envision that religion and anything with sanctity and spirituality must be set aside from social activities and relations. Therefore, vision and religion are placed exclusive and limited to personal matters and they are incompatible with categories of politics and society. This stream of thought must be originally sought in the positions taken by the west against religion.

Imam Khomeini (ra) is one of the unparalleled and outstanding figures of human history, divinely high ideas of whom can open the ways for human community in all fields. Imam Khomeini (ra) maintained that divine religion is based on nature that has good, God-seeking, peace-seeking and justice-seeking character; it has nothing to do with violence and he said any attempt to create violence and religion bond whether interpersonal, social and in international order is doomed to failure. The message of Islam and ideals of Imam Khomeini (ra) is to avoid violence, to emphasize on peace and co-existence as strong pillars of peace in human community and to have dialogue, logic and reasoning as suitable and firm method for understanding differences and approximating thoughts. To Imam Khomeini (ra), there are challenges and barriers for dialogue and peace that human community must remove. For Imam Khomeini (ra), the barriers for sustainable peace in the world are disregarding independence of countries and intervening in their affairs, disobeying the principle of mutual respect, absence of unity among nations, fake peace, humiliating peace, unequal distribution of power, competitive system of superpowers, dependence of international organizations, disremembering justice and spirituality in aims of peace and controlling weapons by wrong crowd. Imam Khomeini (ra) believes that real and sustainable peace can only be achieved by the last Proof, Imam Mahdi (may Allah hasten his emergence) thanks to the world barriers; at that time, oppressors and the arrogant powers will become defeated and there will be real and honorable peace established based on divine teachings all over the world.

Peace and Peaceful co-existence is some type of social behavior that comes into existence within the framework of suitable sense. Social pluralism based on salvation study pluralism is some type of interpretation of peace and co-existence that uses modern philosophical grounds. John Hick, religious philosopher and theologian, has attempted to present new interpretation of Christianity with this approach and passing through historical interpretation of church, thus institutionalizing peace and co-existence among different religions followers. Imam Khomeini vis-à-vis Hick’s approach presents another basis for salvation of religion, peace and co-existence. This article has tried to explore and criticize ideas of John Hick based on his conceptual principles while presenting interpretation of Imam Khomeini from issue of salvation, peace and peaceful co-existence representative of traditional thinking of world of Islam.

Recognition of basic keywords in political thinking of Imam Khomeini (ra) is an important passage to desirably know the politico-mental system of a foundation he laid and memorably left behind legally and institutionally after revolution of Iran in 1357 (1978). “Ummah” is known as a word that has Islamic nature and theme and it has been incorporated from religious literature into political thinking of Islamic thinkers, particularly the great leader of the Islamic Revolution. Research done on practical and theoretical works of Imam Khomeini (ra) indicates that the word keeping its religious originality and adopting its Quranic and narrative origin stands together with conceptual changes of the day like the words of nation and nationalism; it can reproduce itself in thinking of Imam Khomeini (ra) by making use of tools of Ijtihad with the time and space exigencies. The present article tries to make a study of idea of Imam Khomeini (ra) in this regard by means of analytic-descriptive method and library-based studies. By checking the old used word literature by Imam Khomeini (ra), one can draw the conclusion that concept of nation is found a marginal concept and in contact with concept of Ummah and he has never negated nationalism in the sense of rule of people or nation in his statements made about nationalism; rather, he has abandoned ethnicism and tribalism and their undesirable effects that result in division and disunity of Islamic Ummah.