Trustees of God: Religious Revival and Political Theory

By Reza Pechrak

This book is based on a preliminary research which is aimed to study the resurgence of faith orders, particularly as political actors. After years of so-called superficial secularisation and attempt to marginalise the religious man in the societal affairs, we are witnessing the tidal rise of him, which is subject to examination in this book, from a systems analytic perspective as a small step towards the development of a political theory of religion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris UK
• Release date: May 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781514493861

Reza Pechrak

He is a Persian scholar who has been a political activist from his youth. He studied political science and law in Pars (Iran) and left his homeland eight years after the political transition and establishment of a clergy-driven regime in the name of Islam. The writer studied, among other things, political science and criminology in Sweden and Denmark and lives in UK now. A long-term history of journalism and political activism has provided him with insight and information which makes the book interesting to read. The book also is, to some extent, an attempt to fill a theoretical as well as empirical gap in the field of political science to approach the transactions between the political and religious systems without resorting to a theological perspective. According to the writer, this book primarily is written to raise interest among political science scholars and politicians who have special interest in the subject, but any reader will find this research interesting and, maybe, exciting.

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Copyright © 2016 by Reza Pechrak.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2016905531

ISBN:      Hardcover   978-1-5144-9388-5

                Softcover     978-1-5144-9387-8

                eBook          978-1-5144-9386-1

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CONTENTS

Preface

Chapter 1 Introduction

Chapter 2 Political System

Chapter 3 The Religious System

Chapter 4 Dynamics of Boundary Laxity between the Religious and Political Systems: Catalyst Factors

Chapter 5 Faith-Based Capital: From Charity to Economic Rise

Chapter 6 Political Religionism

Chapter 7 Case Study: Persia (Iran)

Chapter 8 Reflections and Conclusion

References

This book is

dedicated to the memory of Olof Palme

and Yitzhak Rabin.

PREFACE

To each generation its crucial political problems seem never to have been matched before; nevertheless, by any measure, a civilisation has seldom been faced with a crisis weighted with graver consequences than that confronting us.

Easton (1969)

We are moving toward a world of 'garrison states'---a world in which the specialists on violence are the most powerful group in society.

Lasswell (1966)

'You're a bad man; let us leave' (Harris, K. 2013). It was a heart-breaking cry from a desperate and scared child who was one of the hundreds of victims of Nairobi incident, addressing the perpetrators. I have a very strong feeling that also the following words would be chanted by billions of people around the world if there was a chance: 'You're bad men and women; let us live!' And this strong feeling is one of the basic motives behind this study. There is not even a day that we do not hear about children who are slaughtered around the globe. It is a nightmare to imagine what a father was telling his child in a hijacked plane on 9/11 who was asking him what was going on. We all feel something is seriously wrong, which is surely more political than religious. Killing children is a religiously rationalised act of insanity; the committers believe 'evil is evil in the mother's womb'¹ and 'from the womb, the wicked are estranged, liars on the wrong path since birth' (Psalm 58:3). It happened for centuries around the world, among them a hundred years ago when more than a million and half Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire became subject to genocide² that with high probability provided Nazi Germany with handbook to Holocaust which indiscriminately exposed millions of the Jewish community members to unspeakable crimes against humanity. This bestial antihuman mindset is still traceable in the doctrine of political religionists who subject nonconformists, particularly the vulnerable ethno-religious minorities, to the most inhuman persecution and brutal suppression, inter alia, Christians in certain Muslim societies, Yazidis in Iraq, Muslims in Myanmar, the members of Baha'i faith order in Iran, and non-believers almost in the whole developing world. Unfortunately, the world is still not sufficiently sensitised to the systematic suppression and slaughter of vulnerable populations, particularly children. It is a disgrace that, for example, perpetrators of Armenian Genocide have never even apologised, and what has been plundered still is in their hand without any shame. Mentioning only the above examples doesn't mean that other similar inhuman atrocities differ in severity or nature. Christians are under persecution around the world, and even peace-loving Buddhists shed Muslim blood.

While I was completing this study, a heinous crime subjected the Yazidi ethnic group as well as thousands of other innocent people in the Middle East to similar atrocities which caused the Armenian Genocide culminating about 100 years ago. This wave of crimes against humanity also victimised thousands of Arabs whose homes were destroyed and occupied by right-wing Kurdish elites, who ironically share responsibility for the Armenian Genocide and chronic persecution. The unbelievable neglect of condemning and prosecuting the Armenian Genocide imposed a tremendous cost to the humanity, and it seems it will cost more under the veil of ignorance by encouraging the baboonish political behaviour in the name God. Unfortunately, the selective perception of crime against humanity is a global phenomenon; we are obsessed with the Israeli--Palestinian conflict but silent about the horror which indiscriminately agonises millions of Jews around the world.

Nevertheless, we constantly hear that modernity has failed, God is back, or secularism is dying, particularly whenever swords took over the scene in the name of faith. Naturally, if mass media use these slogans, they can hardly be blamed for it. But it becomes mind-scratching when these statements are regularly recited by well-funded academic sources and their wage earners almost everywhere. You don't need to be atheist or heretic to treat these claims with doubt, suspicion, or even fear. Facts are abundant to legitimately claim that modernity has not failed but been purposefully compromised, religion has never abandoned its domain within any polity, and secularism has been aborted by invisible as well as visible means. In other words, the human definition of humanity as a product of modernity has become a target for reductionist modification by some political actors who do not even belong to the same ideological convictions. A plausible reason is that modernity and secular mode stimulates sophisticated social purposes that generate and escalate costly and significant needs, expectations, and demands, causing stress upon the political system and occasionally destabilise the power base of certain elites. But what is political and what is not, and what is the dynamics behind the so-called resurgence of faith orders³ as political actors?⁴ Those are the kind of questions that this study addressed.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Statement of Purpose

The specific research tasks in this connection would be to identify the inputs and the forces that shape and change them, to trace the processes through which they are transformed into outputs, to describe the general conditions under which such processes can be maintained, and to establish the relationship between outputs and succeeding inputs of the system.

Easton (1957)

This study reckons that owing to the progress of complex interdependencies⁵ and interpenetrations, the character and essence of interpolitical system transactions or exchange are significantly transformed as boundary⁶ between the political system's intra- and extra-societal environment has considerably changed and still is changing in scope and character to an extent that discussion on the emergence of a trans-societal environment seems fairly legitimate. In other words, an environment constituted of a complex set of systems is developed, which significantly constrains the system of interactions through which binding decisions are made and executed for a society. Consequently, the political systems are under stress to adjust and modify their structures, life processes, and modes of response to sustain their fundamental functions to persist.

Nevertheless, the aim of this study primarily concerns the linkage⁷ between the political and religious systems influencing the interactions through which the authoritative definition, allocation, and reallocation of societal values takes place for a society when development of complex trans-societal interdependencies and interpenetrations exposes the political systems to stress. Regarding the revival of faith orders, particularly as pan-religious political actors, the study is driven by four propositions which are inferred from, inter alia, the literature study of religiously articulated societal interactions, primarily regarding the political revival of faith orders as a cross-border phenomenon and its unique and universal features:

1. The current laxity of boundaries and intensification of communication between the religious/religion system and its parametric societal subsystems, particularly the political system, is to a significant extent explainable by the growth of faith-related capital correlated to the laxity of boundary between the economic and religious/religion systems.

2. The growth of faith-related capital is positively correlated to the state of secularisation, spillovers of Cold War, development of welfare state, and expansion of trans-societal system.

3. Religious extremism is with strong plausibility an outcome of protective policies driven by adversely affected privileged members of certain political systems which mainly consist of vulnerable societal elites and their cross-border distributional coalitions, aiming to aggressively promote laxity of the boundary between the political and religious systems to selectively influence the historically transmitted cultural/religious values and religious communities, exploiting them to manage the mentioned adverse disturbances for the sake of survival.

4. Dynamics behind the use of religiously proclaimed violence are with strong probability similar to the dynamics behind protectionism, which conventionally includes process restriction and product/service market restriction (Murphy 2004). The difference in the above case is that demand for protectionism is extended to restrict or inhibit a particular producer or a category of producers from access to a particular market referencing to non-economic dispositions, such as ethnic and religious.

Considering the above statements, one of the study's ambitions is to promote interest in developing a basic middle-range political theory of religion, studying the communication between political and religious systems, the religious system's politically relevant outputs, and vice versa. This attempt is specifically necessary to prepare a theoretical framework for establishing and explaining the relationship between the political and religious interests to understand the type of political behaviour that generally is labelled as religiously motivated. This field is fairly significant to political studies, particularly due to the extraordinary theoretical void regarding the problem of boundary and linkage between the religious and political systems. The absence of political analysis in this field is so significant that Gabriel G. Almond (Almond, Appleby, and Sivan 2003: 4) quotes from J. Jansen (1997: 11) that 'modern political science categories do not fit and are irrelevant'. This should be added to another prejudice that is reflected in the following value statement made by Charles A. Beard (1929) asserting that 'a science of politics was neither possible nor desirable' (Handy 1964).⁸

When I was writing this book, a freelance reporter James Foley was beheaded. It was immensely painful. I suspect that this heinous terrorist act had a hidden motive that would satisfy both bootleggers and Baptists, as freelance journalists reveal what probably the official mass media are not willing or able to do. I am fairly persuaded that James Foley was not killed at the first place because he was an American; he probably was murdered because he was an independent journalist, and this act was a deterrence measure to make the humanity blind to see what actors are involved in such dirty wars and why, as it might be the case with Charlie Hebdo massacre too.

Nevertheless, the empirical reference in this study is to the modern political revival of faith orders, either as non-violent or militant, in exploring the dynamics behind the development of this phenomenon. This is a matter of concern and interest as persistence of political systems under disturbances triggered by the outputs of religious systems, not rarely leading to stress, is becoming one of the most critical aspects of our current political life, and what political science produced in this relation is not fairly significant. In other words, the problem is twofold. Firstly, there is a significant political scientific knowledge gap regarding boundary and exchange between the political and religious systems, and secondly, there is a lack of political scientific study of political religious actors and behaviour. Consequently and unfortunately, the need has often been addressed by fairly improper professions. Nevertheless, considering the purpose of this study, this book is principally devoted to the following questions, even when the scope of study is considerably wider:

- What are the dynamics behind the current political emergence of faith orders with particular reference to pan-religious actors?

- What explains the exercise of violence by the religiously identified political actors?

Pan-religiosity in this study denotes an ideological orientation promoting solidarity among the members of a religious system beyond systemic boundaries of societies, both internally and externally. Nonetheless, the following statement, which is inferred from an extensive literature study of religiously articulated societal interactions, played a leading role in the study: The current laxity of boundaries and intensification of communication between the religious/religion system and its parametric societal subsystems, particularly the political system, is to a significant extent explainable by the laxity of boundary between the economic and religious/religion systems and growth of faith-related capital.

Nonetheless, chapter 1 surveys theoretical approach and framework. A critical review of political system and persistence theory is portrayed in chapter 2. Chapter 3 is devoted to the conception of religious system, and chapter 4 surveys and discusses catalyst factors which are related to the dynamics of boundary laxity between the religious and political systems. Chapter 5 deals with the faith-based capital as a central phenomenon in the book. Political religionism is presented in chapter 6 and chapter 7 deals with case study of Iran (Persia). Finally, chapter 8 is devoted to reflections and conclusions.

Theoretical Framework

Theories are nets cast to catch what we call 'the world': to rationalize it, to explain, and to master it. We endeavor to make the mesh ever finer and finer.

Karl Popper (2005)

Task of theory is to extend the frontiers of knowledge and not simply to codify what we already know.

David Easton (1965)

This study draws on Easton's theoretical writings. What David Easton developed as a conceptual and theoretical framework since publishing The Political System: An Inquiry into the State of Political Science in 1953 is the main theoretical frame of reference and point of departure, as well as repertoire of analytical tools to be utilised in contemplating the research design, approaching the problem and fulfilling the purpose of this study. As a matter of fact, a fairly inclusive application of this theoretical framework, acknowledged also as political persistence theory,⁹ is the parallel purpose of this study. Therefore, as far as the conceptual scheme and the theoretical framework of this research are considered, the key reference is Easton's works, unless an explanation is submitted.

Theory in this study is narrowly defined as a system of logically interrelated propositions, having reference to matters of known facts,¹⁰ generated by a set of dynamic enquiries and reliably verifiable answers about mode of relationships between selected empirically identifiable variables and theoretically relevant concepts of direct significance to a research. I am fairly convinced that the above definition will sufficiently fulfil my expectations from a theoretical system that, according to Talcott Parsons (1937:9), should be able to 'tell us what empirical facts it should be possible to observe in a given set of circumstances'. This definition, inter alia, implies: (i) the theoretical enterprise generally is a conscious voluntary act to systematically obtain knowledge about certain phenomena when there is an interest, (ii) a theory is comprised of propositions that jointly respond to important changes in any individual proposition, (iii) establishing the grounds of validity of propositions is required as a methodological consideration, and (iv) a theory should recognise the empirically identifiable variables, develop the conceptual scheme, and verify and articulate the relation between them. It means, as Easton indicates, a theoretical framework also forms and defines the bias (Easton 1953: 54) towards a particular discipline in selecting facts by choosing a certain aspect of an event.

Methodology

If we are to learn, however, from the mathematical development of economics, the evidence is that it 'always lagged behind its qualitative and conceptual improvement'.

Spengler (1961)

It is for a very good reason that the progress of quantification should lag---in whatever discipline---behind its qualitative and conceptual progress.

Sartori (1970)

The man who first saw the exterior of the box from above later sees its interior from below.

Kuhn (1970)

As a minor step towards studying the boundary and linkage between the political and religious systems, this study is predominantly explorative and descriptive. It is explorative partially because despite the vast interest in religion as a research subject with unprecedented funding, as I already mentioned, it is mind-scratching that relevant political scientific knowledge in this matter is scarce and relevant political studies are lacking. It means communication between the political and religious systems has been undervalued by clients and practitioners of political science, and although interest in the Western political systems raised some enquiries about the exchange between these societal subsystems to shed light on the interaction processes, those enquiries generally suffered from the liberal democratic bias that religiously identified political parties were committed to secularist doctrines¹¹ preconceiving the boundary and linkage between the two systems as peripheral.¹² In other words, there is fairly low observable interest in the field of political science to systematically study the exchange between the above systems that makes any research in this regard being primarily explorative before anything else.¹³

Almost as a ritual, I also feel obligated to express my opinion about qualitative and quantitative approaches and question of their compatibility or incompatibility. I prefer to briefly state that quantitative techniques have significant measurement and hypothesis-testing capacity and illustrative effects. Establishing quantitative relation between variables is very often necessary. I also am convinced that political scientific reports using quantitative methods are more popular among the sponsors of research. But I prefer them primarily as an approach to probe the outcomes of a qualitative research, if necessary.

Nevertheless, my approach in this contribution is primarily qualitative,¹⁴ which implies that common statistical procedures are not used for data display or analysis. The reason is that, when the influence of behavioural environment is significantly present in a system--system communication, as in the case of exchange between the political and religious systems, quantifying is problematic, and the qualitative method makes more sense. Consequently, the study examines some selected cases in different extent to shed light on the propositions. It is notable that the risk of getting trapped in the selection bias¹⁵ is fairly low concerning the problem under examination. As supported by existing literature, the current pattern of exchange between the political and religious systems has been significantly universal. Nevertheless, the main criterion to select cases has been reliability of sources, no matter if they are primary or secondary.

Notably, the study is partially designed to arrange the recognised facts into a new cumulative argument¹⁶ pattern trying to understand the dynamics of religiously articulated political action in our time even if they are enfolded in normatively expressed aspirations and principles by which some faith-bound actors explain their operations. It is descriptive to the extent that selected societal contexts and factors are presented in relevance to the study's aim. It also is partially theoretical to the extent that political persistence theory (PPT), which is one of the major claimants of the academic authority in the field of political science as an autonomous discipline, is at trial to somewhat filling a substantial theoretical vacuum that concerns the exchange between the political and religious systems in modern time.

On Concepts

A conceptual framework explains, either graphically or in narrative form, the main things to be studied---the key factors, constructs or variables and the presumed relationships among them.

Miles and Huberman (1994)

In an explorative and qualitative study, concepts are the terms which, based on acknowledging important distinctions, designate 'things' about which a research is about to make sense (Dubin 1969), and the conceptual framework is considered as a tool to structure the collection of those concepts and articulate the presumed relation between them, which plays a determining role to provide a valid understanding of the research problem.¹⁷ This study also requires a fairly wide-ranging theoretical framework that, due to its relatively broad empirical generality, calls for selection and analysis of at least five conceptual categories and establishment of their interrelationship. To achieve this purpose, it also is imperative to particularly reconstruct or form new concepts to capture some aspects of reality which are central to this study. The reason is that, firstly, Easton's theoretical system has not been applied comprehensively enough to political reality. For instance, the issue of boundary and linkage between the political system and the variety of its parametric systems, which will define its status within the societal system, have been substantially undervalued by the Eastonian approach.

This overlook limits the scope of the Eastonian theoretical system to identify certain political situations and their major elements or aspects as well as discern and select politically relevant variables. This deficit is in particular relevant to this study as the question of linkage between the political and religious system is the main subject to research in this project. Secondly, Easton consciously chooses to avoid semantic rigor precising the