Varieties of Islamic Social Science

Abstract

ocial sciences like anthropology and sociology have lived several different but overlapping lives in Iran. As Europeanimported discourses about society and history, they informed competing modernist political trends from the nineteenth century onward. As academic fields instituted after the 1950s, they aided the Pahlavi regime’s top-down modernization program and continue to act as applied, problem-solving disciplines to this day. As forms of revolutionary praxis in the 1970s, they galvanized militant students to overthrow the monarchic regime and build a new society from the bottom. In the decades since the 1979 Revolution, they have branched off in still more directions: in epistemological debates on science and civilization, and in critiques of the sacralization of power and bureaucratization of religion in the Islamic Republic. These diverse “lives” of the social sciences are intertwined in complex ways with Islam, where the latter must also be understood in a multiplicity of forms: on the one hand, Islam as a tradition comprising many disciplines of inquiry ( jurisprudence, theology, mysticism, ethics, Qurʾanic exegesis, hadith scholarship, and so on), and on the other