Islamic Political Thoughts
Volume:1 Issue: 2, Spring 2014

The relation between religion and politics is a question of extended background having received a variety of responses. The issue of the epistemological foundations of the issue and the logical possibility of the formation of Islamic politics is, however, a quite recent topic which has drawn the attention of a lot of contemporary analysts. Two main approaches can be distinguished in the field of the Islamic political discourse which believes in the integration of religion and politics. One is the rejection of secular arguments altogether towards deducing the possibility of "Islamic Politics". The other goes beyond the criticism of secularism and talks of the necessity of establishing "Islamic politics". This article deals with the second approach explaining the epistemological foundations of the Islamic politics and introducing the idea of how to make politics accord with religious law. Thus, understanding and practice of politics in a religious society is essentially impossible without reference to its initial foundations.

There has been a close interaction between post-Islamic Iranian philosophical, ethical, as well as political wisdom and Greek philosophy especially Platonic and Aristotelian trends of thought. Muslim Philosophers such as Farabi and Ibn Rushd have been among the major interpreters and commentators of the works of great Greek philosophers particularly Aristotle’s. Hence Aristotle was given the title of "the First Teacher” and Farabi that of “the Second Teacher". A main topic of discussion among Muslim scholars has been the great work of Aristotle, the Nichomachean Ethics, which addressed the author's son. The Arabic version of this book had a great impact on the ethical and civil heritage of Muslim scholars, since there was some closeness between those precepts and the Islamic ones. The present article discusses traces of this impact.

The reconstruction of religious thought is considered one of the essential components of the politico-religious discourse in contemporary Iran towards the revival of religious thought and making religion more efficient. This reconstruction has involved such goals as universality of religious thought towards playing a superior socio-political role, adapting it to the temporal requirements and benefitting from religious potentials towards resisting against domestic despotism and foreign domination. The historical background of this process and understanding its Islamist discourse involve the hard task of identification and evaluation in a world in which we not only witness the opposition of religious and antireligious thought, but we see that the religious thought itself has undergone extensive developments and interpretations. The wide range of this reconstruction among the Shiite scholars of Iran is a turning point in intellectual and practical developments in the history of contemporary Iran. Explaining this issue and its impact on the Shiite political discourse in contemporary Iran, this article seeks to elaborate on religious reconstruction from the perspective of Ayatuulah Murtaza Mutahhari.

This article is an interdisciplinary study of culture and politics that combines insights from political science and the concept of image in the discipline of culture and communication. Relying on various documents and secondary sources pertaining to the period of constitutional revolution in Iran, this article is an attempt to reconstruct the mental image that the Shiite scholars (Ulama) had of western political systems as well as their own government and society. Western domination and its cultural hegemony seemed to threaten Muslim societies including Iran due to western countries' superiority in science and technology. Perceptions of such an imminent danger created a particular image of the west in the minds of majority of Iranian political elite and Shiite scholars prompting them to join in one way or another the reform movement known as the constitutional movement towards saving Islamic culture and Iran from foreign invasion.