W'S BIGGEST POST-911 MISTAKE...:

Sadeghi-Boroujerdi argues that Iran was not immune from such a debate and a group of liberal Islamist intellectuals began to re-examine the Islamic Republic through this lens. Many of these intellectuals would go on to form the reformist camp in Iranian politics with President Mohammad Khatami (1997-2005) being the first Iranian leader to come out of this group. While the movement is broad, a number of characteristics can be attributed to reformist thought including anti-clericalism, a suspicion of state authority, an emphasis on inward piety, an expansion of rights and expressions, limiting state interventions in public and economic life, a move away from "ideology" towards technocratic governance and, for some, the "Protestantisation" of Shia Islam.

The author opens with the example of Professor Seyyed Hashem Aqajari, a reformist intellectual and former member of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, who gave a famous lecture on his issues with the Islamic Republic. During a talk on Ali Shari'ati and his project of Islamic Protestantism, Dr Aqajari was scathing about the state: "Despite some 100 years having elapsed since the publication of the Qajar-era diplomat and author Mirza Yusef Khan Mostashar al-Dowleh's Yek Kalameh (1870), and post-revolutionary reformist politicians' regular demands calling for 'the rule of law', 'law has still not come to rule'... whatever its author's [al-Dowleh's] original intentions, it had come to signify the struggle for the rule of law and the constraint of arbitrary power."

To accuse the Islamic Republic of giving way to the unconstrained and arbitrary power of a handful of clergymen is a common theme in reformist thought. Aqajari, though, went further, writes Sadeghi-Boroujerdi: "For Aqajari, 'Islamic Protestantism' and 'Islamic humanism' went hand in hand and ultimately entailed the clergy's obsolescence. He attributed to [Martin] Luther the credo that every man can act as his own priest." This claim led to Aqajari to be imprisoned for his activism.

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