In his work, Religious Statecraft: The Politics of Islam in Iran, Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar traces half a century of shifting Islamist doctrines to demonstrate that religious narratives in Iran can change in accordance with elite attempts to consolidate and augment power. In this account, Tabaar explains that competing political actors strategically develop Shi’a-inspired ideologies to gain credibility and raise mass support. Taken as a whole, Tabaar’s work depicts Iranian politics as a system in which power drives Islamist ideology.

Using this work as a framework for analyzing the posited question, it is clear how elites derive and construct authority to achieve modernity. In Tabaar’s account, Islam is used as means of gaining authority for political ends, including the attempt to achieve modernity. To the extent that the public views these uses of Islam as authentic, they can be said to be legitimized in the eyes of the public. The elites here, or faqih, guide and shape the opinions of the masses in order to achieve their ends. Note, this is not to say that these elites do not believe in Islam or that their statuses as Muslims are purely ploys for power. Instead, the argument is that the ways in which Islamist ideology are articulated are driven by power and political necessity.

In this depiction, the will of the public is used to mobilize and effectuate change, such as the attempt to achieve modernity. The consent of the people is necessary as modernity cannot be achieved without it, but this consent is ultimately guided and constructed by elites through Islamist ideologies.

In his work Modernity’s Wager, Seligman argues that Modernity’s abandonment of religion has failed and that religious authority should be returned. The eponymous wager, Seligman argues, is that it is possible “to construct an authoritative locus of sacrality on a foundation of transcendental rather than transcendent dictates” (12). This modernist construction holds individuality and rationality as transcendental, displacing the centrality of religion.

Shariati and Motahhari reflected and promoted the notion of mediated subjectivity, a scheme in which human subjectivity is contingent upon God’s subjectivity. This means that while human subjectivity is not denied, it is never independent of God and is thus mediated by the divine. In this way, Shariati and Motahhari try to maintain some account of human autonomy and individualism while still keeping this account fundamentally moored to theistic notions of a transcendent being.

In God and the Juggernaut, Vahdat draws on Kant and Hegel to define modernity via its two pillars of subjectivity and universality, with subjectivity acknowledging the autonomous and self-conscious agent and universality being the recognition amongst autonomous individuals of the subjectivity of each other. While Seligman seems to suggest that modernity and religion are fundamentally incompatible, Vahdat shows how the Iranian struggle to come to grips with modernity led to a degree of convergence with Muslim Iranian thinkers appropriating notions of modern subjectivity, as was mentioned above. In this way, Vahdat undermines the assumptions underpinning Seligman’s argument.

The Western attempt to impose a strict dichotomy on gender is a perfect example of a phenomenon James C. Scott describes in his work, Seeing Like a State. Scott explains that through looking to classify and render the world intelligible, the state attempts exercise control and domination. Similarly, by internalizing Western conceptions of a gender binary, Iranians implicitly submit to Western cultural control while also exercising domination over their own population. As women are now classified in direct opposition to men, so too are they rights and standing in Iran. Women are rendered second class citizens to be controlled and dominated, a phenomenon that came about in its present form with the advent of the attempts to modernize Iran.

Rather provocatively, Najmabadi argues that the feminist project has actively worked to erase the history of this gender-fluid past. Najmabadi argues that this project has worked towards the “disavowal, denial, and eradication of male homoeroticism” (235). In that way, feminists in Iran have indirectly worked to create the tools of their own oppression. Najmabai’s account of this history serves as a reminder to not reify social constructs, particularly the place of women in Iranian society.

The plot focuses on a childless peasant who lives with his wife and their cow. For the desperately impoverished hamlet in which they live, the cow is a primary source of sustenance. Accordingly, the man dotes on the cow, adoring his as cow as if it were his child, taking the cow to graze in the open fields and carefully washing it. His connection to this cow is so strong that when the animal dies under mysterious circumstances while the man leaves to go to the capital, the villagers conspire to lie to him about the fate of his cow, fearing that the truth would break him. Despite these efforts to obscure the truth, the man does not believe the others, eventually turning insane and believing himself to be a cow before coming to an untimely end.

Given the ambiguities surrounding many of the plot points, like what exactly happened to the cow, much of the film itself is left to the interpretation of the viewer. One interpretation of the movie that is very much in keeping with the themes of our class is that the cow can be seen as symbolizing the oil of Iran. The cow is so central to the functioning of the village that its demise leads to a major disruption in the village. Indeed many of the villagers are dependent on this singular cow. Similarly, around this time oil was itself central to the functioning of Iran, to the extent that a threat to its supply constituted a threat to national stability.

Another possible interpretation of the film that would speak to the themes of the course are to consider the village and centrality of the cow to its way of life as representing the inertia of a traditional, culturally authentic lifestyle. As this lifestyle is rudely and abruptly disrupted by the death of the cow, rather than rapidly adapt to changing realities, i.e. quickly adapt Western attitudes and technologies, the erstwhile cow owner chooses to live in a state of denial. This eventuates in the man’s death, while can be read as the filmmaker’s caution to Iran against a refusal to adapt to changing realities.

This anxiety about change and the struggle to reconcile change to traditional culture and ways of life are unique to the Iranian experience of the period. Rather than attempting to whitewash the difficult transition Iran underwent at the time, the film allegorically presents a complete image of the challenges of culturally authentic modernization.