Reflections on Two Revolutions: The Constitutional Revolution of 1906 Versus the Revolution of 1979

Based a secularist reading of history, the Constitutional Revolution should have occurred in 1979 not in 1906 and the Iranian Revolution in 1906 not in 1979. Although it was far behind Egypt and Turkey in terms of economic development in the late nineteenth century, it was the first Middle Eastern country to experience a major revolution for constitutional change in 1906. What is more, the revolution was led by two ayatollahs. In 1979, Iran was a modernizing country highlighted with an impressive rate of economic development that surpassed both Egypt and Turkey. Again, it was the first country to experience a major revolution that brought religious extremists to power. Like the Constitutional Revolution, religious leaders led the revolution. While in the Constitutional Revolution a foreign (i.e., the British) embassy was used to stage a sit-in at its site in order to force the Shah to consent to constitutional change, in the 1979 revolution a foreign (i.e., the American) embassy was seized by a group of religious zealots in order to mobilize the public against the U.S., defeat their liberal opponents, and pass a constitution that gave absolutist power to the ruling cleric.
From the perspective of irreducibility of religious ideas, we employ the concept of discursive space in order to explain these two diverse historical outcomes. To elaborate our understanding of the concept, we start with the premise that any system of sociopolitical thought shaping human behavior—be it rooted in religion, Marxism, or various nationalist worldviews—may display a degree of rigidity or flexibility in incorporating or accommodating new ideas. We conceptualize this flexibility as a discursive space: an interstitial capacity or opening in the conceptual system that enables its practitioners to detect, recognize, discuss, and even reconcile inconsistencies. Although the relationship between discursive space and flexibility may not be linear, to some degree the wider the discursive space, the more flexible the system of thought. The discursive space consists of the space that is occupied by the number of problematic elements in a system of sociopolitical thought that could be removed without essentially causing the collapse of that system. We argue that the discursive space in the Islamic thought in the late nineteenth century was wide and this allowed the rise of Shi’i modernism and support for constitutionalism. In the sixties and seventies, this discursive space narrowed down, provided favorable context for the rise of Shi’i fundamentalism.