Post-Islamism Redefined: Towards a politics of post-Islamism

Abstract

Problematizing Asef Bayat’s notion of “post-Islamism,” this article proposes an alternative definition for the concept, having in mind the case of Iran. The current conception of the term “post-Islamism” may be challenged via a survey of post-revolutionary Islamist movements that resisted the state and as well as Ayatollah’s Khomeini’s concession to the concept maslahat (expediency), through which state expressed preference for modern reason over sharia law. The case of Islamists contesting state power questions the monolithic image of Islamism drawn by Bayat as movements longing to create a state based on the doctrine of velāyat-e faqih. Also Khomeini’s concession to maslahat indicates that the Islamic state must be seen as one of the participants in “post”-Islamist secularizing trends in Iran. Hence, Bayat’s post-Islamism was more of an inevitable political phenomenon adopted by the state itself than a conscious project adopted by Muslim secularist intellectual figures seeking to put an end to Islamism. Unlike Bayat’s post-Islamism, which celebrates the end or a “break” from an Islamist paradigm, this article then invites readers to expose Islamism to post-modern critique, the result of which would not be a negation but rather a revival of Islamism that takes into account the contingencies of the post-modern condition. Similar to post-Marxism and post-anarchism, post-Islamism maintains the ethos of the traditional canon, Islamism in this case, while rejecting its authoritarian and universalist tendencies. A post-Islamist politics has yet to emerge, yet its introductory philosophical foundations have been already developed in the 1990s by figures such as Abdolkarism Soroush and Morteza Avini. Soroush’s post-Islamism, however, ultimately landed in a modernist liberal episteme, hence remained Islamist, while Avini, despite his support for the state, offered a much more radical critique of Islamism while remaining faithful to its ethos.