THE DIALOGUE OF CIVILIZATIONS AND THE ROLE OF THE IRANIAN INTELLECTUALS (WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE NEW GENERATION OF IRANIAN RELIGIOUS INTELLECTUALS)

Mohammad Javad Nateghpour

Dr. Nateghpour is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the
University of Tehran. He holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of
Manchester, where he completed a thesis entitled Modernisation in Iran:
Westernisation or Islamicization. He has published numerous articles on
Islamic Studies.

Civilizations Dialogue as a suggestion from Khatami the
president of Iran in UN, is notable from many aspects. In one view, it would
pave the way for reconsideration of the Human Agencies role in changing the
world through the ballets instead of bullets. This is a vital need for the world
we live in. Historically, all Civilizations in the world continued by their
human agencies as the main carriers of the Civilization traditions.

They spread the Civilization seeds in the world through their
works and dialogues in confrontation with the other Civilizations. Within a
global framework, all Civilizations have a special image about the others. This
image belongs to the notion, which mostly the human agencies make. For example;
during the last centuries, particularly 19^th and twentieth, a long
frontier occurred between the Islamic and Western Civilizations, crystallised
within some imaginations for each other. Persian Civilization by Malkum Khan
(1891), the reign of Terror in Persia written by Sayied Jamal al-Din (1892),
Asads (1984) work on two imaginations, and Balars (1995) Western and Islamic
imaginations to each other, illustrate this notion. It is to say, last two
centuries shaped some imaginations for Iranian and Western scholars about their
Civilizations.

This paper tends to briefly explore the rise of the Iranian
intellectuals during the last two centuries and their role in offering some
images on the Western and Islamic Civilizations. The emergence of the new
generation of the religious intellectuals in Iran, mainly from 1998 on wards,
and their role in some socio-cultural and political changes in Iran that paved
the way for the rise of the idea of Dialogue of Civilizations is another crucial
point made in this paper. The last part of the paper is allocated to the outlook
to the future of this dialogue in its socio-cultural and political dimensions by
focusing on the role of the Iranian new generation of the religious
intellectuals.