A Comparative Study of Differences of Opinion among the Proponents of the West and the Clergy during the Iranian Constitutional Movement

Although the constitutionalist clergy and Westernized intellectuals are considered as ideological leaders of the Constitutional Revolution, these two lines of thinking had deep differences and contradictions which ultimately separated them from each other. The root of these differences can be attributed to the disparity between their epistemological tenets and worldviews. The constitutionalist clergy expressed their viewpoints on thebasis of the values of Islam (Shi’ism) and its teachings but the intellectuals, by emulating their European counterparts, sought to establish in Iran certain new structures which were mostly products of humanist, secularist, rationalist and scienticist schools of thought. Although their political mottos were relatively identical, they offered varying interpretations of them due to the differences in their worldviews. These interpretations were contradictory and sometimes conflicting insofar as the two trends frequently confronted each other especially in the wake of the victory of the movement. Thepolitical thinking of intellectuals was rooted in the ideas of European Renaissance which sought to separate religion and religious institutions from terrestrial matters, e.g. politics, economy, culture etc. Therefore, the above two intellectual trends could never get along with each other