The Evolution of Iran's Contemporary Political Thought with Emphasis on the Question of Modernity

”Iran’s traditional discourse, composed of the two Iranian and Islamic cultural strata, encountered with modernity and the principles that were distinct from each other. During the past 150 years, this traditional discourse found modernity “the other”, and began to deal with it. It was as part of this confrontation that discourses evolved and thinkers tried to approach problems based on their discursive perceptions of modernity. Some thinkers abandoned modernity entirely, some invited to adopt it wholeheartedly, some discriminated between good and bad elements of modernity, and others tried to provide a novel definition of Islamic-Iranian civilization based on the genuine civilizational backgrounds in each. Each of these courses formed a tradition in political thought and founded its own discourse. In an evolutionary process, these discourses were born out of one another to perpetuate a tradition in political thought and respond to problems. The present study adopts a discursive approach to answer the question “how did modernity cause the birth and evolution of political thought in contemporary Iran?