THE LUTHER OF SHI’I ISLAM
Main Article Content
Abstract
This paper examines socio-historical roots of the emergence of the idea of “Islamic Protestantism” within Iranian Shi’i tradition. The central focus of this study is to present thoughts and activities of so-called “Iranian Luthers” as the agents, actors, and prime movers of the birth of Islamic reformation in Iran. These actors whose ideas of Islamic reformation have had great influences and reached broader audiences beyond Iranian territory include Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Ali Shari’ati, Mehdi Bazargan, Hashem Aghajari, and Abdul Karim Soroush. There are a number of Iranian reformers deserve credits for their thoughtful, controversial ideas of Islamic reformations. These Iranian reformers are considered “the Luthers of Islam” for their deep admiration of Martin Luther’s Protestant Reformation, and their calls for Islamic reformation just like Luther did in the sixteenth century Europe. By the socio-historical and descriptive analysis, this paper is not intended to compare two religious reformations in Iran and Europe, but rather to study and analyze their notions with regard to Islamic reformation.
***
Artikel ini membicarakan tentang akar sosio-historis munculnya gagasan “Protestanisme Islam” dalam tradisi Syi’ah Iran, dengan fokus kajian pemikiran dan gerakan yang disebut “Luther Iran” sebagai agen, aktor, dan penggerak utama lahirnya reformasi Islam di Iran. Ide-ide reformasi Islam memiliki pengaruh besar dan mencapai khalayak yang lebih luas di luar wilayah Iran termasuk Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Ali Shari’ati, Mehdi Bazargan, Hashem Aghajari, dan Abdul Karim Soroush. Sejumlah reformis Iran layak mendapatkan perhatian karena pemikiran, ide-ide kontroversial mereka dalam reformasi Islam. Para reformis Iran dianggap sebagai “Luther Islam” karena kekaguman mendalam mereka terhadap Martin Luther, dan mereka menghendaki reformasi Islam seperti yang terjadi pada masa Luther di Eropa abad keenam belas. Dengan analisis sosio-historis dan deskriptif, tulisan ini tidak dimaksudkan untuk membandingkan dua reformasi keagamaan di Iran dan Eropa, melainkan untuk mempelajari dan menganalisis gagasan-gagasan mereka mengenai reformasi Islam.Downloads
Article Details
Copyright and Licensing
Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. In line with the license, authors and users (readers, etc.) are allowed to share and adapt the material. In addition, the material must be given appropriate credit, provided with a link to the license, and indicated if changes were made. If authors remix, transform or build upon the material, authors must distribute their contributions under the same license as the original.
References
Abou el-Fadl, Khaled, The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam from the Extremists. New York, NY: Harper SanFrancisco, 2005.
Abou el-Fadl, Khaled, “Islam and the Theology of Power,” Middle East Report, No. 221, 2001.
Abrahamian, Ervand, “Ali Shari’ati: Ideologue of the Iranian Revolution,” MERIP Reports No. 102, 1982.
Akhavi, Shahrough, “Shari’ati Social Thought,” in Religion and Politic in Iran, edited by Nikkie R. Keddie, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983.
Ali, Abdullah Yusuf, The Qur’an: Text Translation and Commentary, Elmhurst, NY: Tahrike Tarsile Qur’an, Inc., 1987.
An-Na’im, Abdullahi Ahmed, Toward an Islamic Reformation: Civil Liberties, Human Rights, and International Law, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996.
Arkoun, Mohammed, Islam: To Reform or To Subvert, London: Saqi Books, 2006.
Aslan, Reza, No god but God: the Origins, Evolution, and the Future of Islam, New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2006.
Barzin, Saeed, “Constitutionalism and Democracy in the Religious Ideology of Mehdi Bazargan,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 21 (1), 1994.
Bayat, Asef, Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post-Islamist Turn, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007.
Bazargan, Mehdi, “Religion and Liberty,” in Liberal Islam: A Source Book. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Browers, Michaelle and Charles Kurzman (eds.), An Islamic Reformation? Lanham: Lexington Books, 2004.
Buchta, Wilfried, “The Failed Pan-Islam Program of the Islamic Republic: Views of the Liberal Reformers of the Religious “Semi-Opposition,” in Iran and the Surrounding World 1501-2001: Interactions in Culture and Cultural Politics, edited by Nikki Keddie and Rudi Matthee. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001.
Chehabi, H.E., “Religion and Politics in Iran: How Theocratic Is the Islamic Republic?” Daedalus 120 (3), 1991.
Chehabi, H.E., Iranian Politics and Religious Modernism, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990.
Chehabi, H.E. and Arang Keshavarzian, “Politics in Iran,” in Comparative Politics Today: A World View, edited by Gabriel A. Almond, Russell J. Dalton, G. Bingham Powell, Jr., and Kaare Strom. New York: Pearson Longman, 2007.
Dabashi, Hamid, “Early Propagation of Wilayat-i-Faqih and Mulla Ahmad Naraqi,” in Expectation of the Millennium: Shi’ism in History, edited by Seyyed Hossein Nashr, Hamid Dabashi, and Seyyed Vali Reza Nashr, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.
Eickelman, Dale, “Islamic Liberalism Strikes Back,” MESA Bulletin, No. 27, 1993.
Eickelman, Dale, Knowledge and Power in Morocco, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992.
Esack, Farid, Qur’an, Liberation, and Pluralism: An Islamic Perspective of Interreligious Solidarity against Oppression. Oxford: One World, 1998.
Esposito, John L., Unholy War: Terror in the Name of Islam. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Esposito, John L. and Azzam Tamimi (eds.), Islam and Secularism in The Middle East. New York: New York University Press, 2000.
Fuller, Graham E. and Rend Rahim Francke, The Arab Shi’a: The Forgotten Muslims, New York, NY: Palgrave, 1999.
Gold, Dore, Hatred’s Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports The New Global Terrorism, Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2003.
Graham, William A., Beyond The Written Word: Oral Aspects of Scripture in the History of Religion, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Hefner, Robert W., Civil Islam: Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000.
Hodgson, Marshall, The Venture of Islam, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1974.
Hourani, Albert, Arabic Thought in The Liberal Age 1798-1939. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962.
Kamrava, Mehran, “Iranian Shiism Under Debate,” Middle East Policy X (2), 2003.
Keddie, Nikkie R., An Islamic Response to Imperialism: Political and Religious Writings of Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani. Berkeley, CA: Univ. of California Press, 1968.
Keddie, Nikkie R., Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani: a Political Biography. Berkeley, CA: Univ. of California Press, 1972.
Kurzman, Charles (ed.), Liberal Islam: A Source Book. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Lings, Martin, Muhammad: His Life Based on The Earliest Sources, Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions International, Ltd., 1983.
Matin-asgari, Afshin, “Abdolkarim Soroush and The Secularization of Islamic Thought in Iran,” Iranian Studies 30 (1/2), 1997.
Martin, Vanessa, Creating an Islamic State: Khomeini and The Making of a New Iran. London and New York: I.B. Tauris Publishers, 2003.
Mousalli, Ahmad S., Radical Islamic Fundamentalism: The Ideological and Political Discourse of Sayyid Qutb, Beirut: American University of Beirut, 1992.
Noer, Deliar, The Modernist Muslim Movement in Indonesia 1900-1942. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973.
Norton, Augustus Richard (ed.), Civil Society in the Middle East, Leiden & New York: E.J. Brill, Vol. 1, 1995.
Qurtuby, Sumanto al., “Calling for an Islamic Protestantism: Toward Democratic and Pluralistic Islam,” International Journal of Islamic Studies 2 (2). Forthcoming, 2008.
Rahnema, Ali, An Islamic Utopian: A Political Biography of Ali Shari’ati, London and New York: I.B. Tauris Publishers, 1998.
Rakhmat, Jalaluddin, Agama Keadilan (The “Religion of Justice”), Bandung: Mizan, 1997.
Rezaei, Ali, “Religious Life Under Theocracy: The Case of Iran,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 43 (3), 2003.
Sachedina, Abdulaziz, The Islamic Roots of Democratic Pluralism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Sadri, Muhammad, “Sacral Defense of Secularism: Dissident Political Theology in Iran,” in Intellectual Trends in Twentieth-Century Iran, edited by Negin Nabavi. Gainesville: Univ. Press of Florida, 2003.
Safi, Omid (ed.), Progressive Muslims on Justice, Gender, and Pluralism, Oxford: One World, 2003.
Said, Edward, The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983.
Savyon, Ayelet, “The Call for Islamic Protestantism: Dr. Hashem Agsjari’s Speech and Subsequent Death Sentence,” The Middle East Media Research Institute Special Dispatch Series, No. 445 (December 2), 2002.
Schwartz, Stephen, The Two Faces of Islam: Saudi Fundamentalism and Its Role in Terrorism, New York: Anchor Books, 2003.
Shadid, Anthony, Legacy of the Prophet: Despots, Democrats, and the New Politics of Islam, Boulder, CO: Westview, 2002.
Shari’ati, Ali, What is to be Done? The Enlightened Thinkers and an Islamic Renaissance, edited by F. Rajaee, Houston, TX: Institute for Research and Islamic Studies, 1986.
Soroush, Abdolkarim, Reason, Freedom, and Democracy in Islam, translated and edited by Mahmoud Sadri and Ahmad Sadri, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Sukidi, “The Travelling Idea of Islamic Protestantism: a Study of Iranian Luthers,” Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 16 (4), 2005.
Syahrur, Muhammad, Tirani Islam: Genealogi Masyarakat dan Negara [Islamic Tyranny: The Genealogy of Society and State], Yogyakarta, 2003.
Vakili, Valla, Debating Religion and Politics in Iran: The Political Thought of Abdolkarim Sorush, New York, NY: Council on Foreign Relation, 1996