Iran: Civilization and Revolution

by Nandita Chaturvedi

The war of aggression on Iran has changed qualitatively the consciousness of people all over the world, and specially in Asia and India. Iran can be considered a sister civilization to India. Our relationship goes back not only to the time of Ghalib and Khusrau, but from the largely unknown beginnings of human life on the Indian subcontinent, the Indus Valley civilization. Our languages are tied together, as is our conceptualization of human life. Yet, actions of the Indian government in not unequivocally condemning the attack on Iranian civilization itself has betrayed this deep bond of brotherhood we share. Our present government has gone against an unbroken legacy of India-Iran trust, friendship and exchange. The fact that this was done in fear of consequences from American bullying only deepens our shame.

Yet, the Indian people continue to feel love for Iran. This love found its most outward expression in the protests that were held in Delhi, Kashmir, Lucknow and Hyderabad to express indignation and anger at Ayatollah Khamenei’s barbaric assassination in March. Subsequently gifts and donations from the country poured into the Iranian embassy in New Delhi. A Kashmiri woman donated gold jewellery which she had kept as a memento from her husband who passed away 28 years ago. Posters of the Ayatollah were everywhere, in areas with Muslims and especially Shia populations. On the other hand, those who remember a time when Indian foreign policy stood for justice and peace, recognized in the Iranian population the pride of a people who have stood up for humanity. Indians of all sections were moved to see an exhibition of the kind of courage, fortitude, and principle that makes the best of human civilization. As a former government servant told me emotionally, “After Vietnam it is Iran that has made me proud to be an Asian.”

The Western elite has misunderstood Iran. They have taken them to be cult-mad radicalized muslims that are more bark than bite. Yet Iran is not Iraq, and it is not Yemen. The Iranian leadership and state has managed to consolidate itself around a shared vision that is born out of their organic understanding of their own, and world history. The people and leadership of Iran hold the struggle for knowledge and the truth high in their worldview. They are examples of what Sun Yat Sen had called the rule of right over might. We in Asia must see Iran as an example of what civilization can achieve when it is set on the path of the search for truth.

Asia must understand Iran on its own terms, as a civilization with a complex two fold identity which brings into confluence its roots in ancient Persian civilization with revolutionary Islam. 

A Persian People 

It is now well understood that the civilizational complex of the ancient world centered around the interconnectedness of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, India, and China. These represented the beginnings of human self awareness. Both Iran and India share in the fact that they are ancient civilizations unbroken in their trajectory. The people of both nations know this, and their self conceptualization goes back not decades or hundreds or years, but millenia. In an old society like India there is hardly a political debate in India that does not reference the ancient past of our people. Similarly, the Iranian people carry in their ways of being over 5,000 years of human experience.

It is in this context that Donald Trump’s comments that “A whole civilisation will die tonight, never to be brought back again” should be considered. Just as Iran shows the strength of an unbroken ancient civilization, in Trump’s personality can be seen the madness of a materialistic, while supremacist and decadent Western civilization in decline. 

Iranian leadership has long described the enemy as ‘Western civilization’. The war has made clear to the rest of the world the truth of this assessment. Since the genocide in Palestine, the Western elite as well as the Zionist leadership of Israel has openly declared that they were in a war to ‘defend Western civilization’. In Netanyahu’s words, "Israel is a defensive shield of Western civilization in the heart of the Middle East." In a speech earlier this year he declared, “America is fighting with Israel for a common goal: to protect our future, to protect civilization against these barbarians.” Not only that, in his comments at the Munich security conference, Marco Rubio clarified that Western civilization was but another way of describing the colonial and imperial vision of white supremacy. In his words, “But in 1945, for the first time since the age of Columbus, it (Western civilization) was contracting. Europe was in ruins. Half of it lived behind an Iron Curtain and the rest looked like it would soon follow. The great Western empires had entered into terminal decline, accelerated by godless communist revolutions and by anti-colonial uprisings that would transform the world and drape the red hammer and sickle across vast swaths of the map in the years to come.”

Thus, when the Ayatollah declared Western civilization to be the enemy, he was alluding to the Western elite’s own conceptualization of it. Indeed, America and Israel’s strategy of leadership assassination, and their bombing of a girl’s primary school shows that Western civilization may have become in our times the very antithesis of civilization itself. What the American elite does not understand is that they are dealing with in Iran a human quality nurtured over millenia that cannot be destroyed either through bombing or sanctions. As Indira Gandhi had said about the Indian people, “We have been here for thousands of years, over thousands of years we have developed our ability to withstand suffering.” Furthermore, Iranians are a people who love knowledge. Their leadership considers it their duty to study and know history and philosophy. That kind of quality cannot be so easily erased. 

Armed With Revolutionary Islam

It would be wrong to try and understand the Iranian people without seriously considering their embracing of Islam. The history of the anticolonial movements in Asia have seen an emerging contradiction within; between secular nationalism that sought to oppose divisions created by colonial powers along religious lines, and anticolonial struggles fought in religious terms. In India too we saw this tension. Iran saw the rise of a secular Iranian nationalism with the government of Mosaddegh. Mosaddegh was subsequently removed in a coup when he nationalized Iranian oil. A government headed by the Shah was put in place by the West, and religious clergy led the movement against this puppet government leading to the Islamic Revolution of 1979.
The two pillars of this revolution were Ali Shariati and Ayatollah Khomeini. Ali Shariati was a sociologist who studied in Europe and knew intimately the streams of Western thought, including existentialism and Marxism. He would tell the Iranian people that what was needed was ‘bazgasht beh khishtan’ or a "return to ourselves". He also deeply knew anticolonial thinkers and revolutionaries. Although he died before the revolution, his ideas had an impact on it. In Iran he is known as ‘mo'allem-e enqilab’, or mentor of the revolution.

What is clear is that the thinkers of the Islamic revolution studied the experience of the anticolonial struggles deeply. The second Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei is known to have authored a book on the revolutionary muslim stream in the Indian anticolonial struggle and have gifted it to Ali Shariati. In attempting to understand Iranian Islam, I have found it helpful to understand their love for Muhammed Iqbal. Ali Shariati would write of Iqbal, “If one were to reconstruct the form of Islam which has been made to degenerate in the course of history, re-assemble it in such a way that the spirit could return to a total body, transform the present dazed elements into that spirit as if the trumpet of Israfil were to blow in the 20th century over a dead society and awaken its movement, power, spirit, and meaning, it is, then, that exemplary Muslim personalities will be reconstructed and reborn like Muhammad Iqbal.”

Iqbal has been seen before as a symbol of unity between Iran and Pakistan. Yet the full implications of his thought for the anticolonial struggle have not been understood, and have been buried by the bracketing of his legacy into a narrow islamic nationalism. Iqbal must be put alongside Rabindranath Tagore as one of the great poets and philosophers produced by the Indian struggle for freedom. He is in and of India, yet his thought is enriched by streams of Islamic and European philosophy. It is striking that having been born in Sialkot, Punjab and never having visited Iran, Iqbal wrote a large section of his poetry in Persian. He would write in his most celebrated Secrets of the Self, ‘Although the language of Hind is sweet as sugar, Yet sweeter is the fashion of Persian speech, My mind was enchanted by its loveliness, My pen became a twig of the Burning Bush, Because of the loftiness of my thoughts, Persian alone is suitable for them.”

Iqbal’s magnum opus philosophical work was a book titled “Reconstruction of Islamic Thought.” Indeed, the idea of reconstruction, of Asian and Islamic society and the colonized man was a central concern for Iqbal. He saw the degradation of humanity under colonialism, and sought to reinterpret the body of islamic thought in the face of the challenge of colonialism, as well as the enlightenment and Western progress in science. In India this was in parallel with a reconstruction of Hindu thought undertaken by figures such as Tilak, Gandhi and Tagore. The project of reconstructing Islam was also a big part of the ideological foundations of the Islamic revolution, where Shariati and others attempted to address the Western challenge from organic foundations. It is no surprise then that the leadership of the revolution had such an admiration and kinship for Iqbal. Ayatollah Khamenei would assert “Quran and Islam are to be made the basis of all revolutions and movements and Iran was exactly following the path that was shown to us by Iqbal."


Iqbal’s own adoration of Iran led him to see Iran in some ways as the future of the Islamic resistance to colonial domination. He would say, “The conquest of Persia gave the Muslims what the conquest of Greece gave to the Romans; but for Persia, our culture would have been absolutely one-sided.” The finding of roots for Islam in a great and ancient civilization enriched Islamic thought. Further he would say, “If Tehran could become the Geneva of the Orient, The fortunes of this world might change.” (Jamiyat-e-Aqwam or League of Nations). 

Iqbal was a mystic and a modern sufi championing a revolutionary Islam. He rejected the orthodox interpretation of an absolute divine will, which led human beings to be passive in the face of suffering and injustice. Instead, he embraced khudi, the self, and placed the human being at the center of islamic philosophy. In strengthening the self, making one independent and strong in the face of an often hostile world, one could become a co-creator with God. One can even see resonances between Gandhi’s ideas of non-cooperation and sacrifice and Iqbal’s concepts of a revolutionary discipline. It is Iqbal’s revolutionary notion of Islam that one can see in operation in Iran today. People all over the world have noted the contrast of the Iranian people with the decadent Islam of the rich Arab nations that have stood silent before the genocide in Palestine, and layed prostrate before the wishes of the white man. As Shariati would say, “It is not enough to say we must return to Islam. We must specify which Islam: that of Abu Zarr or that of Marwan the Ruler. Both are called Islamic, but there is a huge difference between them. One is the Islam of the caliphate, of the palace and of the rulers. The other is the Islam of the people, of the exploited and of the poor.”

The essence of Islamic thought has been reborn in Iran. The great last act of Ayatollah Khamenei, to die for the unity and peace of his people shows that the spirit of revolutionary Islam permeated his being. Sacrifice is the greatest virtue any civilization can foster. If there is a nation where the spirit of Iqbal and a revolutionary Islam resides today, it is Iran.

The Future

We can see now the huge tectonic shifts that will shape the world’s future. The West has been defeated by a small and determined nation once again, this time in a period when it was already in decline. Around one-fifth of the world’s supply of oil and liquefied natural gas moves through the strait of Hormuz. Iran has asserted control over the strait as a repercussion of the war, and this act could catapult it into becoming a global power alongside China, Russia and the US.

On the other hand, India is set to hold the BRICS summit in New Delhi this year. We must push at this time for a more democratic world order where war, such as that waged on Iran, becomes an impossibility. We must take responsibility for humanity and struggle for a world where no children have to die as casualties in an unjust war. 

The Indian government has tried to play both sides in this crisis, and it is no longer a viable strategy. The West is declining, as is evident to all those who care to look. The future lies in Asia and Africa. We must work hard to rediscover our civilizational and revolutionary relationships with those in Asia: Iran, Iraq, Russia, China, Korea and Vietnam. This is a time when we must struggle to know one another so that a new world can be born.

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​Nandita Chaturvedi is an editor of Vishwabandhu Journal.