Mostafa Malekian: Spirituality, Siyasat-Zadegi and (A)political Self-Improvement

Mostafa Malekian has yet to receive much attention in Western academic literature pertaining to Iranian intellectual life, but inside Iran, he has emerged as a popular public intellectual; seen as both a culmination of and rupture with the project of “religious intellectualism.” Rather than offer a revolutionary and politically engaged vision of Islam, or a “reformist” or “democratic” interpretation of Shi῾ism, his project seeks to integrate what he calls “rationality” (῾aqlaniyat) and “spirituality” (ma᾽naviyat). As Malekian's project has developed, it has broken, in a number of important respects, with mainstream Islam as practiced in Iran, the religious reformist project, and even organized religion as a whole. This article seeks not only to offer one of the first comprehensive analysis of his existential and social thought in English, but also to analyze his project's deep affinities with a pervasive fatigue vis-à-vis collective projects of political emancipation and even “politics” tout court, in the latter phases of the “reformist” President Hojjat al-Islam Seyyed Mohammad Khatami's tenure.