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International relations in the making of political Islam: interrogating Khomeini's ‘Islamic government’

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Abstract

Eurocentric approaches to political Islam tend to deploy an internalist methodology that theoretically obscures the generative and constitutive role of international relations. This article addresses this problem through a critical application of Leon Trotsky's idea of ‘uneven and combined development’ to Ayatollah Khomeini's invention of the concept of ‘Islamic government’. It argues that this concept was international in its socio-political stimulus and intellectual content, and, crucially, reflected, influenced, and mobilised an emergent liminal sociality that combined Western and Islamic socio-cultural forms. This heterogeneous character of Iran's experience of modernity is, the article argues, theoretically inaccessible to Eurocentric approaches’ homogeneous and unilinear conceptions of history, which, as a result, generate exceptionalist modes of explanations.

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Notes

  1. The relevant articles are 5, 2, and 1. Article 110 defines the duties and powers of the leader. The Supreme Leader is selected by the Assembly of Experts, whose members are popularly elected. However, the candidates for the assembly have to be pre-approved by the Council of Guardians, whose members are directly or indirectly appointed by the incumbent Supreme Leader (Article 107). The Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran can be found at http://www.iranchamber.com/government/laws/constitution.php; accessed 16 April, 2010.

  2. A full list of the relevant works can be found in http://www.unevenandcombined.com; accessed 27 April, 2012.

  3. ‘Early’ postcolonialism had close affinities with Marxism and a critical humanist posture (e.g. Fanon 1963; Césaire 1972). Influenced by postmodernism, ‘late’ postcolonialism, by contrast, rejects Enlightenment humanism and ‘foundationalist’ social theory (e.g. Bhabha 1994; Spivak 1994).

  4. As Pasha (2010: 220) suggests, this problem also marks the ‘alternative modernities’ approach (Gaonkar 1999).

  5. I differentiate between capitalist and non-capitalist forms of uneven and combined development (Matin 2007).

  6. For the widespread use of the term ‘backwardness’ in Iran's postrevolutionary intellectual and political discourses, see Matin-Asgari (2004).

  7. Bhabha (1994: 278) refers to a similar lacuna in Foucault's work.

  8. Moin (1999) provides a good biography of Khomeini.

  9. A comprehensive collection of Khomeini's speeches and written work is available at http://www.imam-khomeini.com; accessed 27 April, 2012.

  10. Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, a distinguished Iraqi Shi’a cleric, was also highly influential. Sadr (2010) provided the first systematic elaboration of ‘Islamic economics’ and its alleged superiority to capitalism and socialism.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Justin Rosenberg, Jan Selby, Ben Selwyn, the three anonymous reviewers and the editor of JIRD for their comments that helped to improve the original article.

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Matin, K. International relations in the making of political Islam: interrogating Khomeini's ‘Islamic government’. J Int Relat Dev 16, 455–482 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/jird.2012.15

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