Answering Only to God: Faith and Freedom in 21st-Century Iran - Tapa blanda

Of the many 20th-century upheavals that continue to rattle our 21st-century world, few are as misunderstood or as stubbornly resistant to Western understanding as Iran’s Islamic Revolution. Now, that Iran and its long-time foe, the United States, appear to be mending ties, there is widespread hope that the distortions, misunderstandings, and stereotypes that formed the Western impression of the Islamic republic will end. For more than three decades, viewing Iranian society as an incendiary, pariah state that harbors unrelenting hostility for many of its influential, pro-American neighbors – from Israel to Saudi Arabia – has helped keep the focus on Iran as the implacable foe of U.S. interests. While the degree of demonization will likely subside as Iran and the West improve relations, this is unlikely to bring Westerners to a closer understanding of why the Islamic revolution happened in the first place. The more difficult challenge is to develop a proper appreciation of the far more fundamental role played by the vexed questions of religion and religious identity – topics that readers, analysts, politicians, and academics all too often discount in favor of more familiar and comfortable factors: the political, the economic, and the strategic. This is not only true for Iran but for Arab societies as well, which are often studied and analyzed with little attention paid to the role religion in destabilizing societies and fomenting violence. The Western understanding of history, grounded in the Enlightenment with its general disdain for religion, has compounded the difficulty of analyzing and understanding those societies – in contrast to our own – in which religion has never been formally separated from other central aspects of social, political, and intellectual life. Answering Only to God is an attempt to redress this state of affairs by focusing much-needed attention on the very questions that continue to this day to animate Iran and, by extension, much of the contemporary Arab and broader Muslim world: What does it mean to be a good Muslim? And who gets to answer that question? In the specific case of Iran, these concerns have taken on another, related aspect, chiefly, Can the Iranian Revolution deliver on its promise to create a society that is both recognizably democratic and legitimately Islamic?

Geneive Abdo is a Fellow in Stimson’s Middle East program as well as a Non-resident Fellow at the Brookings Institution. She currently chairs the Religion, Identity, and Countering Violent Extremism working group of the Atlantic Council’s Task Force on U.S. Strategy in the Middle East.She specializes in issues regarding modern Iran and political Islam. Abdo directed the U.S.-Iran Advisory Group, a program on Iran, in conjunction with Heinrich Boell Stiftung, North America. She is the author of the monograph “Salafists and Sectarianism: Twitter and Communal Conflict in the Middle East,” published in March 2015 by the Center for Middle East Policy, the Brookings Institution. She is also the author of “The New Sectarianism: The Arab Uprisings and the Rebirth of the Shi'a- Sunni Divide," published in April 2013 by the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. She has published three books and is working on a fourth about Shi’a—Sunni relations, forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Jonathan Lyons is an independent scholar and author, focusing on problems of intellectual history, epistemology, and the sociology of knowledge. He is the author of four books, including The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization, which has been translated into 12 languages, and Islam through Western Eyes: From the Crusades to the War on Terrorism. He has a PhD in sociology from Monash University, in Melbourne, Australia, and a BA with honors in Russian and History from Wesleyan University. He is currently working on a revisionist history of the Islamic world.