Document Type : Research Article (Political Thought)

Author

• Abbas Emadi

Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

Political rights are one of the achievements of modernity that emerged in the realm of Iranian political thought concurrently with the Constitutional Movement and have been recognized as one of the components of the modern state in Iran through an evolutionary process. This article examines the historical and intellectual contexts of Iranians' confrontation with the issue of political rights on the threshold of modernity. The main question is why and under the influence of what factors were modern political rights proposed in the Iranian-Islamic tradition as a suitable strategy for transition from traditional order to the modern one. This research, utilizing Alasdair MacIntyre's perspective and referring to the documents and writings of the Constitutional Revolution era, descriptively and analytically explains the transition of the Islamic intellectual tradition based on the people's political rights. The article argues that on the threshold of constitutionalism, a combination of intertwined political crises (despotism and dominance of Western powers) and economic crises (poverty and societal backwardness), alongside the Iranian people's familiarity with new political concepts and institutions, resulted in epistemological crisis of the tradition, thereby facilitating the transition to a new political order. Indeed, the acceptance of the rights and political freedoms, and the establishment of a new political order grounded in these principles, has been regarded as an idea to overcome the epistemological crisis of the Islamic tradition, particularly in the absence of a local alternative or the inability to realize one.

Keywords

• Islamic Tradition
• Modernity
• Modern State
• Political Rights
• Constitutionalism

Main Subjects

• Political Thought