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“… Khomeini was actually a radically modern<\/a> leader. For one, the cleric’s notion that the Iranian nation<\/a> did not stem from any general or popular<\/a> will but derived from God<\/a>‘s mind, which as a charismatic leader he arrogated himself the right to interpret, was wholly novel: an extraordinary deviation, in fact, from a politically quietist<\/a> Shiite tradition in which all government<\/a> appeared illegitimate in the absence of the Twelfth Imam.<\/p>\n Khomeini belonged to a long line of revolutionary<\/a> nationalists<\/a> that began with Giuseppe Mazzini … Khomeini’s ideas were embedded in modern notions of representation<\/a> and egalitarism. His notion of state<\/a> power as a tool to produce a utopian Islamic society was borrowed from the Pakistani ideologue Abu Al-Ala Maududi, whose works he translated into Farsi in 1963. (Maududi’s vision of imposing Islamic order<\/a> from above in turn was stimulated by Lenin’s theory<\/a> of an elite as vanguard of the revolution<\/a>.) …<\/p>\n With its many affronts to dignity and freedom<\/a>, the Revolution was in this respect like the many self-defeating projects of human liberation<\/a> since Rousseau<\/a> started to outline them in the eighteenth century. … The Islamists … offered dignity – often a substitute for freedom<\/a> in the postcolonial<\/a> context …<\/p>\n Khomeini … grasped more clearly<\/a> than modernizing-by-rote monarchs and despots the deeper and transformative potential of the idea brought into being by the Enlightement<\/a>: that human<\/a> beings can radically alter<\/a> their social conditions. …<\/p>\n A religious or medieval<\/a> society was one in which the social, political and economic order seemed unchangeable. …\u00a0 The idea that suffering could be relieved, and happiness engineered<\/a>, by men radically changing the social order belongs to the eighteenth century. …<\/strong><\/p>\n The idea of a perfectible society … turned into a faith in top-down modernization; and transformed traditional ways of life and modes of belief – Buddhism as well as Islam – into modern activist ideologies. …<\/p>\n Meanwhile, the religious impulse had not simply disappeared in Europe … Europeans simply had erected new absolutes – progress<\/a>, humanity, the republic – to replace those of traditional religion and the monarchy. … The metaphysical and theological core of Christianity … was often found at the heart of modern projects of redemption and transcendence … Revolution or radical social transformation effected by individuals<\/a> was increasingly seen as a kind of Second Coming; violence<\/a> initiated the new beginning<\/a>; and in the final approximation of Christian themes, history<\/a> was expected to provide the final judgement … Nearly every major thinker in Europe<\/a> … also transposed Christian providentialism into would-be rationalistic<\/a> categories. …<\/p>\n Christian eschatology even suffuses the political ideals of today<\/a>‘s insistently Islamic radicals and Hindu nationalists<\/a> – an inescapable irony of history<\/a> … The cross-currents of ideas and inspirations, … the varied ideological inspirations of Iran’s Islamic Revolution<\/a> (Zionism<\/a>, Existentialism, Bolshevism<\/a> and revolutionary Shiism) – reveal the picture of a planet defined by civilizations closed off from one another and defined by religion (or lack thereof) is a puerile cartoon. …<\/p>\n Radical Islamists or Hindu nationalists insist on their cultural<\/a> distinctiveness and moral<\/a> superiority precisely because they have lost their religious<\/a> traditions, and started to resemble their supposed enemies in their pursuit of the latter’s ideologies<\/a> of individual and collective success …”<\/p>\n aus: Pankaj Mishra: Age of Anger, a History of the Present. O.O.: Allen Lane (Penguin Random House) 2017, S. 153-159.<\/p>\n