Prof. Dr. Nahid Mozaffari

Due to the commercial, scientific, industrial, and military advances of the West (and colonialism), the model of Western modernity and its attributes, including a monolithic understanding of the association between modernity and secularism, have often been considered applicable to the whole world. However, if we set aside the tradition/modernisation and religion/secularisation paradigms and dichotomies, and historically contextualise the coexistence of “realms of religion” (shar) and “realms of custom” (urf) or non-religion in the pre-modern period, and in relation to different articulations of modernity in different cultural milieus (Iran and the Middle East in my case), the co-existence of “multiple modernities” and “multiple secularities” is plausible.
Following my previous studies and those of Talal Asad, I believe we should consider “the secular” as an epistemic category. In constitutional Iran, the secular was presented by some intellectuals and activists as a rational, humanist principle that would not deny the right to religious belief but would restrain its intolerant tendencies with the eventual hope of relegating it to the private sphere. This view was contested by most but not all religious scholars or ulama. In previous research, I dealt with secularity as an intellectual concept and did not address its relation to materiality or “spheres of action”. In this project, I would like rearticulate this historical inquiry as a thematic investigation of sociocultural realms of secularities coexisting with realms of official and non-official religion and the relation between secularities and materiality. In the case of Iran, one would have to investigate the processes of boundary demarcation between the religious and other spheres, and the plurality of secularities in different periods. Such demarcations existed in the pre-modern period in Iran; in the modern period, we ascertain these boundaries according to vastly differing conceptions of modernity (Qajar period, Pahlavi period, Islamic Republic). I would like to focus on spaces in each period where secularities were functionally practised by different segments of the population. The questions I will pose for each period will include whether and in what capacity (and what elements in society) the religious/secular binary existed in the different historical contexts. I will also consider whether and how societal groups resisted the binary when it was state-imposed as was the case in the Pahlavi and Islamic Republic periods.