ISLAMIC REVOLUTION STUDIES
Year:2015 | Volume:12 | Issue:42|Papers Count:17

The victory of the Islamic revolution of Iran, the role of Imam Khomeini’s leadership in this revolution and leading the revolutionary struggles within the arena of presence of various discourses as well as its dominance to the other discourses formed in Iran raises this question that how the revolution’s leader was able to turn the Islamic discourse to a hegemonic discourse which was in conflict with the dominant discourse and in competition with the rival discourses. Having a view on the theoretical framework of Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse analysis, the study proves this claim that the Islamic discourse with reliance on its powerful political agents especially leadership of Imam Khomeini and his particular capabilities had this capability to be turned into a hegemonic discourse and create a revolutionary victory with an Islamic nature.

Various theories have been proposed by the theorists about whatness of national identity and the effective elements in its formation and development. Nevertheless, all of these theories and viewpoints have an issue in common in that national identity is a type of “conscious self-differentiation from others”. Enjoying the theory and approach of socialism and also based on the thought and epistemic system of Imam Khomeini and the Supreme Leader, the study seeks to answer three questions about Iranian national identity: firstly, what are the dimensions of national identity? Secondly, what factors are involved within these dimensions? Thirdly, what are the threatening factors of the mentioned components and how is it possible to confront with these threats by getting advantages of national identity? The perspective of this study implies that because of its features, the socialism approach possesses a good capability to explain the subject of this study.

A systemic understanding of Imam Khomeini’s cultural viewpoints will be possible by studying various propositions being proposed by him about various cultural subjects when a theoretical structural inference of these viewpoints is made. Then, based on the distinctive and specified aspect of this structure, it is attempted to organize Imam Khomeini’s cultural viewpoints as a coherent cultural theory. With an emphasis on the distinctive innovations and concepts of Imam Khomeini and adopting an analytic-descriptive approach as well as using the Philip Smith’s framework which proposes a cultural theory from a study, firstly, the paper seeks to reconstruct Imam Khomeini’s cultural viewpoints. After that, the paper shows what capacities and areas in understanding the Islamic Republic are achieved from the proposed framework from Imam Khomeini’s cultural theory.

The present research aims at explaining and indexing Imam Khomeini’s political thoughts in three types of political philosophy, political jurisprudence, and political ethics. Here, we intended to analyze Imam’s response to three main questions about political philosophy, political jurisprudence, and political ethics based on the Islam’s three-dimensional division pattern and within the framework of Imam’s thought, then, indices of each type were determined and introduced. The findings of the study which were in compliance with systemic thought of Imam showed that there is a logical and significant relation among the three mentioned types and perfection and imperfection of each one affects the other one; otherwise, the desirable society will not be realized. Also, by observing Imam’s systemic viewpoint, we can say that a full understanding of his political thought will be achieved by understanding the three mentioned types. Among the advantages of this paper we can refer to analyzing Imam’s political thought in conformity with his pattern and thought system as well as determining the evaluation indices of each one.

The study tries to find an answer to the question that “what is the status of duty-oriented ethics in Imam Khomeini’s political thought?” To meet the goals of the study, the dimensions of duty-oriented ethics, the components of performing duty and the relation between duty and result in Imam Khomeini’s political thought were discussed by applying an analytico-descriptive method. The results of the study imply that duty-oriented ethics has been the main factor of Imam’s political thought in both fields of theory and practice. However, the main point of the study is about the relation between duty and result that has been clarified within the process of the study that Imam’s duty-oriented ethics does not imply being ignorant of the result though in imam’s political thought, the principle is fulfillment of the duty and the results lies in the heart of the fulfillment of the duty.

One of the important topics in political thought is maintaining the system. Having an analytico-descriptive method to analyze the state jurisprudence components, the study investigates the principles of maintaining the Islamic System in Imam Khomeini’s political thought. Imam Khomeini believes that political provisions are in line with maintaining and flourishing religion while the government system is a power to execute the religious provisions and to show flexibility in some emergency cases and conditions based on its specific principles and limitations but in a temporary state. For him, maintenance of the system is among the most important duties and in conflict with other provisions, maintenance of the system is more important than other provisions in regard to governmental decree, expediency of the system, and secondary provisions.

The mutual relation between an individual and political system in a society is linked to the positive attitude of the people about the political regime and authoritative officials in that society. Study of the constructive and reductive factors of this relation i.e. political trust requires observation of some standards specified to each social ground and context which are being modeled from Imam Khomeini’s viewpoint in the present paper. It seems that his presence within the realm of Iranians’ social and political life and being aware about their rules are deemed to be important assets regarding the political trust issues. The grounded theory has been the basis of describing Imam Khomeini’s pattern in this study. Accordingly, his ideas in ‘Imam’s Sahifeh’, a rich resource, were analyzed and based on the strategy of the grounded theory in qualitative studies, three stages of open, axial and selective encodings were carried out on the data of the text. Also, Imam Khomeini’s theory about the concept of political trust was explained within the framework of a paradigmatic model.

Islamic Revolution of Iran once gained victory contrary to the will of cruel powers, met with overthrowing plots. However, Imam Khomeini`s leadership and presence of the revolutionary people caused them to be of no effect. Such being the case, the cruel powers tried to destroy the revolution by establishing an imposed war by Saddam. The paper has intended to attain and study Imam Khomeini`s strategies and type of management in leading the Imposed war. Using such strategies as oversight and information based management of war affairs, supervising head officials and public media, measured decision, opposing national obstacles, spiritual and cultural supporting of military forces, he managed the war and caused enemies to be defeated.

In this research, one of the modern narrations and readings about the Islamic Republic of Iran and Imam Khomeini’s agency in this regard has been criticized and abolished. In the first part, the incompatibility problem of the two concepts of “Islam” and “revolution” has been resolved which includes three discussions: the lack of union of “Islam” and “Revolution” because of being belonged to two different conceptual worlds, conservatism of Islam and its social forces and sacred-like structuralism raised from believing in decree and destiny. Then, the issue of origin and nature of “political-Islamic” discourse has been studied. The main question of the paper is that whether the modern inferences based on secular humanities taken from the two concepts of Revolution and Political Islam are in proportion and in compliance with what has been realized in the Islamic Revolution and Imam Khomeini’s thought and practice or not. With the theoretical and experimental analyses, this result has been achieved that studying the Islamic Revolution and Imam Khomeini’s political agency in a modernistic approach would lead to distortion of the truth and nature of the Islamic Republic.

Based on their nature, governments have purposes and they are in attempt to achieve them. Islam religion has recognized justice and freedom and they have been taken into account in the texts and literature of the Muslim scholars especially in the modern period. For Imam Khomeini, the great goals of Islamic Government rest upon two branches of justice and freedom. Among the requirements of justice is the foundation of religion, law, and society on justice, education and refinement of human and government. Also, the requirement of executing justice is based on three tasks of legislating laws based on justice, executing the laws based on justice, and justly supervising the execution of laws. On the other hand, if the government can simultaneously bring justice and freedom to manifestation in a society, we will see a peaceful society along with unity among the people of that society.

The present paper intends to have a comparative study of the political thoughts of two outstanding Shiite Faqihs, Allameh Nainie and Imam Khomeini, within the framework of Thomas Spragens’ Crisis Theory. It is stated in the study that the main common aspects of their political views include the type of interpretation from the source of political power, defending the Islamic territory, believing in the role of public in realization of political system and their will in divine goals’ realization while differences of their views could be realized in the areas such as the foundation of legitimacy, the nature of government, the area of possession and ruling of Faqihs, and the attitude of the ruler. However, implementing these two views by the basis of Spragens’ crisis theory shows that the differences between their viewpoints are due to the crises of their period and each one of these scholars has been under the influence of the specific conditions and crises of their own periods in which they attempted to propose a different solution and this has been the reason of differences in their viewpoints.

The paper is mainly concerned with proposing a thought-oriented and systematic attitude to political thoughts of Imam Khomeini and application of theory in analysis of political thoughts. The study aims at organizing the stages of knowing the problems, reasons, ideals, and solutions theoretically in Iman Khomeini’s political thought. According to the findings of the study, to Imam Khomeini, the main problems of Iran’s society are internal despotism and external colonialism while intellectual and ideological degenerations of the Muslims are the main reasons in causing these problems. The desirable ideal to remove such problems requires establishment of an Islamic State. Finally, Imam Khomeini declares that the mere solution of establishing Islamic State and dismantling internal despotism and external colonialism is revolution.

One of the frequently questioned and doubted issues has been the role of senior scholars and grand ayatollahs in political issues especially Imam Khomeini’s movement and the Islamic Republic of Iran. We are looking for answer to this question in this paper. Since we are dealing with an extensive discussion, the role of grand ayatollahs and senior scholars of Najaf and Qom were studied. By analyzing the historical documents we came to this conclusion that during the movement from 1962 to the victory of the Islamic Republic in 1979, almost the majority of the grand ayatollahs contributed in promotion and support of Imam Khomeini’s movement and the Islamic Republic in various degrees in Qom and Najaf by holding consultative meetings, issuing notifications and declarations, sending telegraphs to the governmental authorities, answering different political inquiries, being present in some sanctuaries, and political gatherings. Although there are disagreements among them to some extent on methods and limitations to fight against the previous regime, none of the titles such as “being nonpolitical”, “advocate of separation of religion from politics” and “opposition to formation of Islamic government” could be attributed to these grand ayatollahs.

For some theorists, rationality without spirituality is a prominent feature of modernity. The present paper investigates modernity, rationality and spirituality from Imam Khomeini’ viewpoint about the Islamic world and Michel Foucault’s from the West. The experience of modernity has proved that the self-founded rationality of human without presence of spirituality and metaphysics’ world has not been successful in conducting human to his main location. By formation of the discourse of the Islamic Revolution with Imam Khomeini’s leadership, the forgotten position of spirituality was revived and Michel Foucault was impressed by this issue. The findings of this study indicate that because of omitting spirituality, modernity has been encountered by fundamental impasse while for Imam Khomeini, the way out of this impasse is human movement toward the world of meaning. In this regard, the present study has used library and internet materials and applied an analytico-descriptive method to analyze the data.