At its simplest, modernity’s wager is that religion can be replaced with rationality and reason. Seligman says the wager has been lost: this transition cannot be made. His proposed solution is to return to a kind of unquestioned religious belief, but a religion characterized by tolerance.

Shariati, while not articulating the same rationale, presents a similar conclusion. Following in the legacy of Al e Ahmad, who mourned what he saw as Iran’s self-loathing love of the West, Shariati called for “a return to an authentic Islam as an answer to modern problems” (Secor, 13). This solution built upon Al e Ahmad’s ideas by claiming that liberal, ‘modern’ ideas of the West were authentically Islamic— because these ideas did not belong to the West, but were born of Islam. Shariati advocated for a “limited freedom,” where the “liberated” Iran could “subordinate their will to the will of God.” In this way, Shariati’s claim seems to replicate at least part of Seligman’s: humans are liberated, but with (and even through) constraints placed upon them by a higher authority.

I think there is, however, a marked difference between Shariati and Seligman. Shariati argues against a need for clerics, taking the stance that there was no need for mediation between God and man. His claim that Islam was “open to multiple, competing orientations” seems at first take to mirror the ‘tolerance’ prescribed by Seligman. More deeply, though, this undercuts the main basis of Seligman’s proposition– that what is needed is unquestioned belief in a set of basic tenets— as Shariati’s solution still places man as the ultimate arbiter of right/ wrong, as each person can interpret the will of God in their own way. For Shariati, then, the problem is one of authenticity; his utilization of Islam allows for modernity to be ‘claimed’ as Iranian. Shariati’s wager, it seems, would be that without this claim to authenticity, ‘modernity’ would destroy Iran, leading to a similar consequence as that posed by Seligman— the people would be left ‘placeless’ and would become inheritors of an anomic condition.

I think Seligman’s argument in Modernity’s Wager can be brought into better relief by pairing it with the concept of religious nationalism as proposed by Aghaie. While Seligman aims to disprove the claim that religion, specifically religious authority, and modernity are antithetical to each other, Aghaie similarly argues against a view of nationalism which insists on its secularism. Both push back against the desire for increasing secularity and argue for some form of compromise with religion. Where they differ, is in their academic arenas. While Seligman writes in the flighty and incarnate language of philosophy, which is ultimately interested in the modern self, Aghaie points to the physical substantiations of religiosity, writing that “religious nationalism is a symbolic discourse imbued with religious piety, social values, identity, culture, and symbolic referents. This discourse is necessarily substantiated in interpersonal interactions, explaining a cultural conversation around nationalism, but not directly addressing this religiosity’s implications for the modern self. Although their arenas of study are different, Aghaie’s religious nationalism represents the antithesis to the “privatization” of religion which frustrates Seligman. The philosophers who helped craft this public form of religious nationalism have all attempted to resolve Seligman’s problematic in one way or another.

Of these figures, I lean towards Abdolkarim Soroush as being the most successful at achieving Seligman’s aim, but also perhaps the one most precariously leaning towards remaking the wager. Soroush is insistent that Islam should be a part of Iranian nationalism. He tempers this, however, by arguing in favor of a synthesis of three components; national heritage, Islamic heritage, and western culture (Aghaie 190). This argument was fundamentally a refutation of “westoxication” but it also has bearing on Seligman.

Seligman is ultimately interested, not in returning to some previous form of authoritarian religiosity, but in adopting a tolerant and skeptical religious belief that continues to allow the expression of the individual. This is quite similar to the views Secor accredits to Soroush. Of his view on theology, she writes “although faith might be ineffable at its core, the human effort to understand and apply God’s truths was one grounded in the limits, the methods, and the temporality of all human studies” (Secor, 74). Soroush believes firmly in the importance of certain, “ineffable” truths, but he continues to apply reason and skepticism to them, thus creating the tolerance Seligman argues in favor of. There is of course, the danger that in trusting too much in reason, Soroush remakes the wager Seligman has outlined. It seems that the skepticism Seligman desires must always put one perilously close to this edge.

Ali Shariati’s works effectively corroborate Seligman’s thesis that modernity’s wager was lost, or, perhaps better put, Seligman’s book provides justification for the ideologies and strategies that Sharihati used in helping to craft a new Iranian political consciousness. Seligman thought that modernity had failed society; while Shariati was not convinced that modernity in its generally accepted form had failed the world, he was certain that it did not provide the proper solutions for Iran.

Shariati, when viewed through a Seligman lens, was looking to reclaim modernity through surrendering individual or “rational” control over all decisions and creating a more centered populace capable of applying both logical thought and religious principle to events in their day-to-day lives. Just as Seligman viewed humanity as inherently based in some set of commonly accepted notions of “divinity,” Shariati saw Iran as naturally grounded in Islamic principles and having been tempted away from those principles by the West’s “violent road to modernity.” Shariati did not seek to wholly eradicate this modernity, recognizing that his people had reached a certain point of enlightenment at which it would be impossible for them to govern their lives solely on trust in Allah. However, he did envision a society in which the political intellectual freedoms protected and espoused by a republic would be counterbalanced by the fundamental code of Islam. Shariati’s writings can be seen as galvanizing a practical application of Seligman’s theory.

Regarding Vahdat, I see both Seligman and the Iranian thinkers we have studied as providing evidence for the possibility of a harmonious co-existence between universality and subjectivity.  Philosophy is not reality however, and modern Iran (including events during the revolution that effectively created it) provides evidence that undermines the potentiality of said harmonious co-existence in its originally imagined form.

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.

Please note:  Blog posts for this week are due on Saturday, the responses to a response on Sunday.

Adam Seligman offers a provocative claim of loss and anomie against what he describes as modernity’s lost wager. In what ways do the religious thinkers and politicians that we’ve studied so far, including Taqizadeh, Al e Ahmad, Shariati, Motahhari, Soroush, among many others (please pick at least one) replicate or resolve the problematic that lies at the heart of Seligman’s book?  Alternatively, how does Farzin Vahdat’s book, God and Juggernaut, affirm or disconfirm the arguments of Modernity’s Wager?

Today Westerners often perceive Iran as a socially backwards society, one in which women are “forced” to wear the veil, prevented from enjoying many basic freedoms (for example, studying certain subjects in university, having the right to work, or move outside of the country without their husband’s freedom). This aligns with the traditional Western view of Islam as a backwards and static religion which has refused to embrace change through the 1300 years of its existence and is diametrically opposed to equal rights for men and women.

The Najimbadi book, however, turns these perceptions on their head. An argument can be made that 19th century Iran was more sexually liberated and gender-fluid than any Western country at the time. Indeed, the same sexual freedom that Western countries celebrate today (and shame Iran for not having) was present in Islamic Iran over a century before it entered European and American discourse. Whereas there were clearly delineated differences between women and men in European countries, with any type of homosexual relations, or situations that could be interpreted as involving homosexual relations, being strictly taboo, Iran saw a peaceful coexistence of definitively homosocial spaces and a tacit acceptance of homosexual relations. The idea of men experiencing periods of time both as an object of sexual desire and a pursuer of sexual “objects” was not only revolutionary for the time in Europe, it was abhorrent. Even in the mid-1900’s, when the sissy became a popular and accepted role in Hollywood film, thus to some extent normalizing men as “sexual objects,” this figure was taken by audiences as a joke. (In Iran, in contrast, the pursuit of young more “feminine” males by older males was tacitly accepted as natural).

Modern Iranian perceptions of gender then stem not from some archaic Islamic tradition, but instead from the impetus for a heteronormative society and strict gender definitions that was put upon them by the Europeans themselves! This is an excellent example of what Mirsepassi would call the “violence of modernity;” the desire of Europeans to enforce their norms as the only accepted modernity for the rest of the world. In the 1800’s, gender fluidity was seen as abhorrent to Europe; thus Iran was perceived as backwards for embracing it. Today, gender fluidity is the norm in many parts of Europe; thus Iran is perceived as backwards for its strict delineation of men and women.

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.

How does Najmabadi’s account of gender fluidity in premodern Islamic Iran help us to understand the ongoing debate and attention to the status of women in postrevolutionary Iran?

Historically, “modern” nations have placed a great deal of importance on the status of women in the measurement of “modernness.” Especially in Iran, the state of how modern it was becoming could at least partially be seen by the status of women in Iran.

In premodern Iran, women faced the issue of being seen as “unredeemable,” as Najmabadi put it. Women, in men’s eyes, were generally seen as being on the same level of attractiveness as young boys with the beginnings of a mustache. They were also seen as intellectually and physically inferior to men, and thus women were merely a footnote for much of Iran’s history. Having neither incomparable beauty to young men nor intellectual or physical strength in the eyes of men, women generally felt a feeling of resentment and opposition towards the amrad, which, paradoxically, caused much of the large-scale homophobia which became widespread during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Along with this later-problem-causing notion of the relative attractive equality of women and young men, there existed in premodern Iran the lack of a sharp Western distinction between women and men as we see today in Iran. It is very possible that the widespread removal of the veil during the 1960s and 1970s in Iran was caused by women feeling a lack of dignity on account of this lack of distinction. To simplify, what I mean is that since women felt the need to passively “compete” with the relatively fluid amrad for bearded men’s attention in the premodern era in Iran, perhaps the removal of the veil was a rejection of this “competition” and a statement of attractiveness despite men’s opinions otherwise. The rejection of the veil may well have been a bold but subtle reclamation of beauty for Iranian women.

I made a similar connection to Will when I read Najmabadi, thinking of the creation of the gender binary of having similarities to the ideals presented in Scott’s work. Creating the binary made the world (specifically people’s bodies) more easily legible, as the possibilities of what/ who they could be, at least “proper” possibilities, were much more limited and less ambiguous. When Scott talks about the abstraction and simplification of maps, he presents it as something that both labels what is already there (responds to the present conditions) and influences what it becomes, as the way the area is regarded changes after its simplification of the map, and this influences the people living there and the way others interact with it. Similarly, the changing understanding of gender and homoerotic attraction affected both the way people perceived gender in Iran and the way gender was acted out. The issue of women’s veiling. There is so much ambiguity surrounding the topic, as the physical covering of the veil also renders its wearer more visible. While the veil is sometimes viewed as a mark of un-modernized views on women’s roles and positions in society, it could also sometimes be viewed as making the female body ‘acceptable’ to appear in a wider social, public contexts.

Najmabadi’s account of gender in premodern Islamic Iran helps to show that beliefs binary sexuality/ gender labels were not deeply ingrained in sensibilities that are either essentially Islamic or Iranian, and that the current status of women could not be a natural outworking or such beliefs. Rather they are extremely historically and situationally contingent, as these beliefs emerged after contact with the ‘modern,’ more ‘advanced’ Europeans.

Najmabadi’s account of gender fluidity in Qajar Iran provides an interesting contextual background to contemporary discourses around Itranian women, a background which is rarely talked about or accounted for. While reading Najmabadi I was reminded of Scott’s account of Le Corbusier and his obsession with straight lines. Two quotes particularly stuck out to me: “Reason…is an unbroken straight line” (Scott, 107) and “I insist on right-angled intersections” (Scott, 108). In many ways, the hetero-normalization of gender and sexuality which Najmabadi discusses reflects a similar desire for straight lines and right angles. According to Najmabadi, the erasure of the amrad from the sexual landscape reduced its complexity to one line; “the screening of the ghilman by the hur now made both positions feminized” (Najmabadi, 41).

The straightening of the streets of Iranian sexual mores may have made them legible to western eyes, but they also obscured nuances of Iranian gender politics. Many westerners did not understand the dynamic of homosocialization, which had characterized Iranian culture. To western eyes, homosocialization was seen as a desire to avoid temptation, thus the need for the veil. However, this does not encompass the whole story, because the amrads did not cover their heads and men would therefore be tempted regardless. It is only in light of the reduction in gender fluidity that homosocial spaces can be seen as regressive and anti-modern. The western narrative on women and their position in Iran sees them as objects of desire and temptation. However, knowing the history of Iranian gender fluidity, this simplified account must be rethought. The female figure has not had a monopoly on eroticism and therefore there were other forces at play in the homosocial spaces of Iran.