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Sayyid Qutb in Iran: Translating the Islamist Ideologue in the Islamic Republic
Abstract
Although a glut of studies have explored the dissemination of Sayyid Qutb’s thoughts and the impact of his widely-circulated works on the formation of Islamist ideology in the Sunni world, less attention has been paid to the influence of Qutb on the Islamist movements in prerevolutionary Iran. However, in parallel with the translations and multiple production of Qutb’s works elsewhere in the Islamic world, almost all major works of Qutb, including his voluminous commentary of the Qur’an, were rendered into Persian between the 1960s and 1970s. Qutb has been avidly read in Persian by his Iranian audience and his books went into multiple printings before and after the revolution. This paper examines the motives behind this translational movement from an Islamist Sunni author for a Shi'i audience in prerevolutionary Iran, and argues that the translations from Qutb played a very instrumental role in shaping the discourse and vocabulary of the Islamists in prerevolutionary Iran. It also maintains that Qutb’s works came as a ready-made source for inspiration and political mobilization for the Islamist youth in Iran. Concurring with Maria Tymoczko who sees translation as an ethical, political and ideological activity rather than mechanical practice, this paper argues that Qutb’s translations in Persian were instrumental in resistance to contemporary western ideologies and to the secular Pahlavi regime which strove to implement anti-clerical reforms. The present study also investigates the way in which the translators of Qutb rendered his works into Persian and introduced the author to their authors, by exploiting on the introductory remarks of the translators in the translated works. It should be noted that the translators of Qutb were by no means invisible characters. Quite to the contrary, they were highly visible and publicly active figures including today’s religious supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the Islamic Republic’s first ambassador to the Vatican, S. H. Khosrawsahi, among others. In addition to the translations from Qutb, this paper also seeks to demonstrate the living hermeneutics of Qutb in today’s Iran where Qutb has been reinterpreted in the light of contemporary developments. Towards this end, a conference on Sayyid Qutb, held in Tehran in 2015 with a considerable attendance has been discussed in this study. The conference in not only a good indicator of the vivid memory of Qutb, but also an important occasion to observe changes and continuities in the perception of Qutb among the attendants of the conference.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
Iran
Islamic World
Sub Area
19th-21st Centuries