The Constitution of Iran: Politics and the State in the Islamic Republic [Hardcover]

Asghar Schirazi (Author), John O'Kane (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1997 | ISBN-10: 186064046X | ISBN-13: 978-1860640469

This work offers an insight into the ideology and practice of an Islamic state. Political life in Iran is analyzed and chronicled, showing the gradual transformation of the state from intended theocracy and republic to a heirocracy in which Islam and the shari'a play a subordinate role. The book takes as its starting point the major contradictions inherent in the constitution - between its legalistic and democratic components and between the alleged potential of a legally and ideologically interpreted Islam as a means of solving social problems, and the growing evidence that this Islam is an inadequate legal and political basis for government in present-day Iran. It charts the gradual replacement of Islamic legalism with the interest of the state as the key criterion for dealing with problems arguing that in this manner a separation of state and religion is taking place. Finally, the book points to a growing crisis of the shari'a and the religious seminaries as the self-appointed guardians of the shari'a. This crisis has opened the way for possible developments in the Islam of the future.

Editorial Reviews

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)

About the Author

Asghar Schirazi is Research Associate in the Department of Political Science, Middle East Studies Section, at the Free University of Berlin.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 325 pages
• Publisher: I B Tauris & Co Ltd (January 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 186064046X
• ISBN-13: 978-1860640469
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,277,992 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Important, but needs an editor, December 10, 2000

By 

matthew osborne - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Constitution of Iran: Politics and the State in the Islamic Republic (Paperback)

I admit it: I ordered this book on the basis of its title. I was researching the Republic of Iran for a comparative government class, and the university library is woefully short on books about non-Western civilizations.

Schirazi is the sort of professorial writer who needs an editor as good as his ideas. He is comprehensive, but not exhaustive, in explaining the contradictory origins of the written constitution that resulted in its inherently flawed nature (the very idea of a Republic is Western in origin, which is hard to reconcile with the "Islamic" nature of the Republic.) He writes like an academic, and would benefit greatly from having an outsider to reorganize his work and challenge him to pare down his ideas to make them more manageable. I don't think that the translation is his problem.

Schirazi certainly does bring up several points that were nowhere else in my reading (and I read A LOT of books for an undergraduate paper); a great example is "maslahat," the legal practice of meeting necessity instead of traditional or "feqh" law. Khomeini's attempts to press the clerics into using maslahat, in order to build a judiciary that could be both Islamic AND run a modern state, is emblematic of the picture of Khomeini that emerges from other authors. Abrahamian's "Khomeinism," for example, establishes rather well that he was not a fundamentalist at all, but a pragmatist; Schirazi ties this surprising truth to the actual CONSTITUTIONAL practices of the state.

Schirazi does not closely examine the parastate in this work, which I would argue is its main fault. One cannot understand the institutions of the clerical state without understanding that the real power has always lain in the bonyads, control of the paramilitaries, and the informal structures of the Majlis. I hope that the renewed sense of openness in Iran will spur closer examination of the parastate by political scientists, sociologists, and others.

Otherwise, Schirazi and his translator have done something sorely needed in America: they have brought a poorly-understood, under-studied government of great geopolitical importance to better light.

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Constitution of Iran, July 31, 2001

By 

Daniel Pipes, Middle East Forum, Philadelphia (Philadelphia, PA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Constitution of Iran: Politics and the State in the Islamic Republic (Paperback)

Close observers of the Iran have long puzzled over the paradox of the anti-Western Khomeini founding a republic based on a constitution that represents the nation via the decisions of a parliament which is chosen through popular elections-for these are all Western concepts. In a exquisitely detailed and revealing study of Iranian politics, Schirazi (a researcher at the University of Berlin) makes this paradox the center of his research and provides an important new understanding of the ideas that have dominated Iran for nearly two decades.

In particular, Schirazi notes two giant contradictions at the heart of the Islamic Republic: a government that supposedly rests on the pure principles of Shi`i Islam in fact draws heavily from Western secular sources entirely alien to the Shari`a (Islamic sacred law); simultaneously, its authority also rests on the authority that derives only from God but also from the will of the Iranian people. The author shows the historical roots of these contradictions (in 1906 the mullahs looked to a constitution to make the government more Islamic), then devotes the bulk of this fascinating book to the practical working out of the dilemmas they create and showing how these have molded contemporary Iranian life. In a word, secular defeated Islamic, God defeated the people.

Middle East Quarterly, Sept 1997