World War II and Religious Futurality in Iran

In the first four decades of the twentieth century, some Iranian thinkers and prominent clerics provided some new religious interpretations that were focused on the “rationalization” of Shi’a theological beliefs. However, these rationalized interpretations prescribed a future informed by the golden past of the Muslim community. The outbreak of World War II transformed these temporal orientations. The massive violence associated with the World War II, the reconfiguration of power structures in Iran during the War, and the kind of ideal future that was desired and imagined by other religious communities, like Christians, Jews, and Bahais, transformed the temporal preoccupation of shi’a ideologues from the past to the future. In this new temporality, the earlier discourse of religious rationalization was kept but the temporal orientation changed. This paper examines how the futural reorientation of Shi’a ideologues was formed after the outbreak of World War II, how this reorientation prioritized a planned future over an apocalyptic end of time, and how this reorientation paved the way for the development of an orderly Shi’a clerical institution in Iran in the 1940s.