Dissonant Politics in Iran and Indonesia

The election of Mohammad Khatami in May 1997 surprised Westerners and Iranians alike. Khatami's assertion that Islam would be strengthened by getting the state out of the business of imposing religion defied the most sacred premises of the Islamic Revolution. That Iran's new president, himself a cleric, argued for the rule of the people while affirming the right of Khomeini's heir, Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamanei, to serve as the "Supreme Leader," suggested the sudden emergence of a profound ideological divide at the very pinnacle of the state. Yet such anomalies were hardly new, nor unique to Iran. In Teheran, as much as in Rabat, Amman, or Jakarta, politics pivots around the institutionalization and strategic manipulation of symbolic contradictions. That this dynamic has received so little attention reflects an abiding conviction, particularly among students of Islamic politics, that authority systems must ultimately be based on one dominant form of legitimacy or domination.1 Thus John Esposito and John Voll argue that by reinterpreting "core concepts ... central to the political positions of virtually all Muslims," Islamists have forged notions of "Islamic democracy" that are as coherent and legal-rational as any secular vision of democracy.2 Similarly, scholars who hold that Islam's quest to link politics