This essay first appeared in autumn 2005 in issue 24 of Cheshm-Andaz, edited by Nasser Pakdaman. It discusses Aramesh Dustdar’s The Impossibility of Thinking in Religious Culture, published in Persian by Khavaran in Paris in 2004. The English title used here translates the Persian title.

In my assessment, the book formulates the Iranian cultural problem with exceptional force. Its importance lies not merely in the severity of its verdict. Dustdar asks what allows questioning to occur and to reach a culture’s foundations. I will first reconstruct his argument, then develop three objections.

A culture that places its foundations beyond questioning

Dustdar proposes a causal relationship between religious culture and the impossibility of thought. Impossibility has a strong philosophical and logical meaning here. It does not simply describe abstention, intellectual weakness or a decision not to reflect.

The reason, he argues, is that religious culture is non-questioning. Thought begins by asking what something is, why it exists and how it can be understood. A culture organised around truths exempt from questioning blocks that activity precisely where it would become radical.

On this account, thinking does not mean possessing a truth that ends inquiry. It requires the ability to question truth itself, its existence, form and conditions. Investigation cannot terminate by command. A culture that requires questioning to stop removes thought’s own movement.

Religion is the most visible expression of this closure, but religious culture cannot be reduced to religious observance. An apparently secular language can reproduce the same structure when its assumptions are beyond challenge. The issue is cultural non-questioning rather than worship alone.

Dustdar believes the Iranian heritage, before and after Islamisation, has been organised through this structure. He describes a dead end rather than a temporary crisis. His project seeks to expose its conditions without offering a ready-made route out.

Religious continuity and Islamisation

Islam represents a decisive moment in his interpretation. Conquest gives the Arabs a new historical existence, while the administrative and cultural resources of conquered territories, particularly Iran, contribute to the new Islamic order. Dustdar draws especially strong conclusions about that order’s dependence on Iran.

He stresses the appropriation of Syrian and Iranian administrations, the Arabisation of government and the replacement of earlier coinage. These are, in his reading, the materials of a new power. His assertion that Islam could not have survived without conquering Iran remains a counterfactual interpretation, not a historically verifiable fact.

Iranian adoption of Islam would then fundamentally transform cultural identity. The re-establishment of Iranian rule under the Tahirids, Saffarids and Samanids would not undo religious dependence. Political independence and cultural emancipation would not necessarily coincide.

Dustdar discusses the suppression of Babak’s and Mazyar’s movements with Iranian participation. He therefore rejects an explanation based exclusively on external domination. The problem also involves the appropriation of the religious order by local populations and elites.

His argument does not contrast an originally free Iran with an Islam solely responsible for closure. An earlier religious culture, associated with Zoroastrianism and imperial authority, would have enabled the reception and renewal of the new order. Islamisation would preserve a structure of non-questioning while changing its form.

Dustdar recognises an important difference: earlier Iranian empires had to accommodate different peoples and beliefs. Their tolerance would have been a political necessity. Yet in his account this coexistence also preserved systems of representation whose foundations remained unquestioned.

This must be reconstructed as the book’s thesis. It cannot describe every practice, conflict and possibility in Iranian history. Its strength is the question it formulates; its risk is reducing a long history to a single property.

The encounter with Greek philosophy

The distinction between Greek and Islamic culture is central. Dustdar holds that Greek inquiry does not subordinate investigation to revealed truth. Islamic thinkers, by contrast, would have to receive Greek concepts within a world already determined by revelation.

He reads Ibn Khaldun and Avicenna through the boundary between what can be questioned and what must remain intact. His first concern is not their learning but the freedom of inquiry. Mastery of philosophical vocabulary does not, for him, establish that foundations have genuinely been exposed to criticism.

The relationship between God and nature illustrates the opposition. Dustdar distinguishes Aristotle’s inquiry into motion and its principles from a theology in which a God absolutely separate from the world commands it. He argues that the reception of Greek metaphysics within an Islamic framework altered its meaning.

This reading does not claim that the Greeks had no gods. The difference concerns human relations with them. Tragedy stages a human will confronting its destiny, even in defeat. Dustdar contrasts that confrontation with a religious submission that would make questioning the ultimate foundation impossible.

His judgments on art, tragedy and comedy in Islamic culture are especially sharp. He gives the Shahnameh the status of an Iranian exception. These aesthetic judgments form part of his argument but cannot become a factual claim that the societies concerned have no artistic creativity.

Dustdar also treats Ibn al-Muqaffa and, more cautiously, Razi as exceptions. Their recognition exposes a difficulty: how can an activity be described as impossible when some of its manifestations are acknowledged within the culture?

Toward the end of the book, emancipation is nevertheless associated with a philosophical exercise of the self. Freedom begins with thought and thought with freedom. Dustdar gives priority to a personal, inward freedom of questioning, preceding social and political liberties. My objections begin here.

First objection: thought has political conditions

Defining philosophy as unrestricted questioning is productive. But it becomes reductive if the Greek event is treated as an exclusively intellectual achievement. Thought did not emerge independently of transformations in the city and the organisation of public speech.

The polis and Greek democratic experiments created spaces in which laws, decisions and arguments could be debated. Chronological distinctions and social exclusions must be retained: philosophy’s emergence was not simply an effect of a completed democracy. Their relationship remains indispensable to the inquiry.

Castoriadis allows political autonomy and philosophical questioning to be considered together. A society recognising that it institutes its own laws can ask whether it wishes to continue living under them. The common order is no longer received entirely from an external, unquestionable authority.

Logos thus becomes speech exposed to public criticism. Freedom of thought is not merely an inward property. It requires relationships in which arguments encounter other arguments. Testing an idea depends on being able to express it and receive objections.

Suppose Aramesh Dustdar can think freely in solitude. Can he present his argument in a lecture hall at the University of Tehran? If that speech is prohibited, is his intellectual activity not affected by the absence of political freedom? Separating private thought from public liberty does not resolve the difficulty.

Kant had already raised the problem: suppressing the public communication of ideas can affect thought itself. We think with others, submitting proposals to them and receiving theirs. Freedom does not merely consist in preserving an inward content inaccessible to the police.

Language reveals this social dimension. It does not remove a thinker’s individuality, but supplies meanings, distinctions and interlocutors. The question becomes which institutions allow questioning and criticism to become shared practices.

The Enlightenment’s struggle against censorship and arbitrary power cannot be separated from its philosophy. Habermas emphasises the public sphere’s political function: it allows society to subject authority to discussion. A critique of religious culture that omits this dimension may attribute to culture what also depends on institutions.

Second objection: thought and belief are not fixed opposing blocs

The radical opposition between thought and faith creates another difficulty. If thinking means unlimited questioning, thought must also be able to question its own definition and its relationship with what it calls non-rational. Closing that inquiry in advance would contradict its own requirement.

Philosophy’s name recalls a relationship of desire toward knowledge. Eros participates in knowledge for Plato; Aristotle opens the Metaphysics with the human desire to know. That desire should not be reduced to sexual desire. The point is that thought is not an activity detached from all affective life.

A rationalist tradition can portray philosophy as the intellect’s exclusive possession of truth. The Greek experience, with its myths, opinions and conflicts, is more complex. Conversely, belief is not merely an external obstacle: its resistance may become what provokes thought to move.

Inherited norms, institutions and representations initially provide the means through which we think. Heidegger examines what still prevents us from thinking; Marx investigates ideological representations shaping our understanding of the world. No subject begins from an absolutely unconditioned point.

The movement toward autonomy is consequently rare and fragile rather than a naturally given possession. Traditions provide meanings and security that inquiry can destabilise. Thinking requires a renewed struggle against closing the question, including within doctrines that call themselves rational.

Third objection: questioning also involves proposing an answer

No one entirely owns the language in which they think. Words carry meanings sedimented over centuries. Yet language also permits those meanings to be displaced and questioned. Inheritance is therefore both a constraint and a resource for transformation.

We do not question only to prolong the question indefinitely. We seek understanding, an answer and an orientation. An answer can subsequently become a conviction insulated from criticism. No thought is permanently protected against becoming dogma.

The search for meaning precedes philosophy and continues within it. Questions about the world’s origin, humanity’s place and its destination belong to religions as well as metaphysics. Philosophy does not always eliminate them; it changes their concepts, methods and criteria.

Aristotle’s first mover and Plato’s mythic constructions show this proximity without abolishing differences. Jean-Pierre Vernant encourages examination of how Greek thought takes up religious problems and languages while changing their explanatory forms. The distinction is not between two worlds without a shared history.

Questioning also reaches the criteria by which a doctrine establishes its claims. Discussions of Popper’s falsifiability and Kant’s a priori conditions must nevertheless respect their objects. Scientific demarcation is not an ordinary empirical hypothesis, and transcendental conditions are not simply immutable habits. Criticism should address their justification rather than manufacture a contradiction.

Thought takes form in answers remaining open to other answers. Its autonomy depends less on having no inheritance than on being able to reconsider what it has itself instituted. Dialogue, controversy and revision are therefore constitutive of thinking.

We return to the political question: what society gives its members the means of discussion without a limit imposed in advance? How can freedom of thought and social freedom become dimensions of the same reality? Dustdar’s framework leaves this question insufficiently developed.

A work that compels the question to be reopened

These objections do not diminish the book’s importance. Dustdar unsettles established assurances and forces questions of modernity, democracy and autonomy in Iran to be reformulated. His demands remind us that emancipation cannot advance while the foundations of an order remain sheltered from inquiry.

He also shows that acquired knowledge cannot replace the courage to question. For that courage to exceed the individual exception, however, it must become a social possibility. Criticism of unquestionable truths and the construction of a free space for discussion require one another.

In that sense I regard the work as enduring. It does not settle the Iranian cultural problem. It gives it a formulation whose difficulties themselves require more demanding thought. We owe Dustdar the fact that this discussion can no longer be avoided.

Bibliographical guide

Aramesh Dustdar, Emtenāʿ-e tafakkor dar farhang-e dini, Khavaran, Paris, 2004; Cornelius Castoriadis, Ce qui fait la Grèce, 1. D’Homère à Héraclite, Seuil, 2004, and Sujet et vérité dans le monde social-historique, Seuil, 2002.

Immanuel Kant, What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking? and The Conflict of the Faculties; Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere; Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?; Jean-Pierre Vernant, Religions, histoires, raisons. These are references in the original review; this adaptation paraphrases rather than reproduces their wording.