Reviews: Beyond Shariati: Modernity, Cosmopolitanism, and Islam in Iranian Political Thought

Siavash Saffari , Beyond Shariati: Modernity, Cosmopolitanism, and Islam in Iranian Political Thought (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press , 2017). Pp. 213 pages. $97.00 cloth. ISBN: 9781107164161

Iranian Thought

Textbook treatments of international politics tend to associate the phrase "dialogue among civilizations" with former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami. Shortly after his election in 1997, Khatami proposed a General Assembly resolution asking the United Nations to commit to the phrase's aspirations. In effect, he was asking for a different world order--one that contrasted with years of Cold War and anticipations of a clash of civilizations in its wake. Around the same time, American political theorist Fred Dallmayr published a number of works promoting a line of inquiry he called comparative political theory (e.g., Dialogue Among Civilizations: Some Exemplary Voices [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002]). For Dallmayr, comparative political theory involves a dialogical approach, interpreting unlikely pairs of thinkers together and finding common ground across cultural divides. In recent years, his efforts have caught on. Comparative political theory has become a burgeoning subfield of political science in Europe and North America--a disciplinary formation where the postcolonial turn transforming other corners of the social sciences and humanities has generally been absent.

Beyond Shariati, Siavash Saffari's first monograph, brings together Khatami's better-known and Dallmayr's lesser-known calls for a "dialogue among civilizations," applying Dallmayr's approach to a group of contemporary Iranian intellectuals known as neo-Shariatis. In the early 2000s, as Khatami's presidency continued to spark hope, neo-Shariatis entered a newly invigorated public sphere with their own distinct brand of reformist discourse. Positioning themselves against Abdolkarim Soroush--whose concept of "minimal religion" they misread--they argued for a pragmatic form of indigenous modernity, one that took the "public presence and social functions of religion" as a given while casting suspicion on Western-style liberal democracy (pp. 98-99, 172-73).

Following Dallmayr, Saffari situates neo-Shariati ideas in...