Guardianship, Basic Liberties and Reform: A Post-Islamist Critique of Iran’s Post-revolutionary Constitution

Abstract

This chapter focuses on constitutional politics, where I argue that the main challenge for the Iranian political system from the perspective of political liberalism is the privileged political status given to Shia jurists (fuqaha) in what Rawls calls “the public political forum”. After an overview of Rawls’s main arguments for basic liberties and a note on the history of Iran’s post-revolutionary era, I argue that the fundamental inequality between fuqaha and non-fuqaha, embedded in the Constitution, conflicts with the liberal requirement that a just constitution needs to guarantee equal basic liberties for all citizens, regardless of their religious, social, economic or sexual characteristics. This argument is complemented by an Islamic justification, inspired by the work of Abdullahi An-Naim and confirmed by the intellectuals whose ideas were discussed in the previous chapters, in favor of demands for a transformation in Iran’s sharia-based public law through a structural constitutional reform. A reference to the challenges regarding the practicalities of the constitutional reform is also presented at the end. This chapter can be regarded as drawing on some of the practical consequences of the post-Islamist theories elaborated in the earlier chapters.