A Postmodernist Reading

by: Mansoor L. Limba, PhD

Director, Shajaratun Muntazirah Educational and Research Institute, Cotabato City, Philippines

ABSTRACT:

By using ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ words purely derived from Islamic metaphors and signifiers, Ayatollah Khomeini castigates the West’s claim to meta-narrative and pretension to universality. He deconstructs its appropriation of the cultural production of voiceless ‘others’ and setting of the rules of the game – the ‘same’ versus the ’other’, the ‘West’ versus the ‘Rest’, ‘civilisation’ versus ‘barbarism’. Contrary to Muslim apologists, eclectics, and hybridists’ clichés of articulating Islam within the Western logocentric logic, the Ayatollah articulates an overarching discourse in the idiom of the Islamic truth regime with almost no reference at all to Western political doctrines. In particular, Khomeini’s notion of mahdawiyyah is a discourse outside modernity’s logic of Westphalian nation state sovereignty. I argue that mahdawiyyah is a pursuit of what Rorty called ‘final vocabulary’; it is to turn up side down the table of the ‘self/other’ project. Indeed, mahdawiyyah is a tale of both de-centring and re-centring (the de-centring of modernity and re-centring of Islam) and the guiding light of the Iranian foreign policy.

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