Publics, Politics and Participation

LeVine and Salvatore 81

assured their identity; in this fashion that had brought to life

Islam as a revolutionary force.^58

And here, crucially, he reminds the reader that in the sentence before
Marx’s famous line about religion being the opium of the people, Marx
argues that religion is “the spirit of a world without spirit”—“Let us say,
then, that in 1978 Islam was not the opium of the people precisely because
it was the spirit of a world without spirit,”^59 i.e., a form of affirmation of
will unknown to the way technologies of power worked within modern
politics. It was almost a non-biopolitical (and therefore “spiritual”) form
of power, yet one with a legitimate aspiration to modern credentials, and
therefore conducive to uncertain effects. In this light, the dilemmas and
the discursive breaches of Islamic reformers and revolutionaries in the
modern era, in Iran as in the Ottoman Empire and elsewhere, might no
longer be assessed as a failed attempt at constructing an endogenous
modernity, but simply as a variation in an effort of metamorphosing tra-
ditions—and therefore the “authentic self”—under the structural condi-
tions of modernity, an effort that is always painful and never fully success-
ful, not even in such rare revolutionary eruptions as the Iranian events.

Conclusion: From common sense to politicized spirituality?

The concept of the public sphere delineated through religious mobili-
zation’s orientation to the “common good” reflects an intersection of
class and political cleavages with religious discourses. This intersection
becomes increasingly powerful as governments face chronic shortages of
funds for social welfare and development, especially in the post-9/11 era,
in the framework of an increasingly militarized neoliberal globalization.
Equally important is that these developments reflect the drive by socio-
religious movements to achieve political, social, and cultural justice for
their constituencies at the same time as they exhibit a deeply intolerant
stance toward those viewed as situated outside their community. A project
examining the dynamics of the Palestinian Hamas and Israeli Shas move-
ments in Palestine/Israel in which we participated demonstrates that this
drive depends on at least three processes: a redefinition of the organiza-
tional and programmatic outlook of socioreligious movements vis-à-vis