Imam Khomeini’s Conception of Mustad‘afin and Modernity’s Concept of Sovereignty

A Postmodernist Reading

Abstract

By using ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ words purely derived from Islamic metaphors and signifiers, Imam Khomeini castigates the West’s claim for meta-narrative and pretension to universality. He deconstructs its appropriation of the cultural production of voiceless “others” and setting of the rules of the game – same/other, the West/the Rest, civilization/barbarism. Contrary to Muslim apologists, eclectics and hybridists’ clichés of articulating Islam within the Western logocentric logic, the Imam articulates an overarching discourse in the idiom of Islamic truth regime with almost no reference at all to Western political doctrines. In particular, the Founder of the Islamic Republic’s Qur’anic notion of mustad‘afin (downtrodden) vis-à-vis that of mustakbirin (the arrogant) is a discourse outside modernity’s logic of the Westphalian nation-state sovereignty. As guiding principles of its foreign policy, Iran tries “to prepare the way for the formation of a single world community… and to sustain the continuity of the struggle for the liberation of all-deprived and oppressed peoples (mustad‘afin) throughout the world” (Preamble of the Constitution). It considers its ideal “the realization of human felicity throughout human society”, and “independence, freedom and the rule of justice and Truth to be the right of all people of the world” (Article 154 of the Constitution). In sum, the notion of mustad‘afin is a pursuit of what Rorty called ‘final vocabulary’. It is to turn upside down the table of “self/other” project. It is a tale of both de-centering and re-centering – the de-centering of modernity and re-centering of Islam.