1 This is a preprint version of a book chapter published in Between Dissent and Power: The Transformation of Islamic Politics in the Middle East and Asia, edited by Khoo Boo Teik, Vedi R. Hadiz, and Yoshihiro Nakanishi (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2014), 66-88. DOI: 10.1057/9781137408808_4 Made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License Chapter 4 Islamic Dissent in Iran’s full-fledged Islamic Revolutionary State Yasuyuki Matsunaga 1. Introduction In this chapter, I will approach political dissent relationally, drawing on insights gained from the recent theoretical innovations in the field of political sociology (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001; Tilly 2006). That is, dissent will be examined as adversary relations between sets of contending actors. In the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI), various state institutions, such as the Guardian Council, the Special Court of Clergy, the Islamic Revolution Court, and various Election Supervisory Boards, typically constitute one side of these adversary relations. Actors on the other side of those relations range from some rival state institutions, such as the Majlis (Parliament) and the Government (the Executive Branch), to dissident mujtahids and lay religious intellectuals to officially banned but tolerated political groups such as the Freedom Movement of Iran ( Nehzat-e Azadi-ye Iran ). The relational perspective adopted in this chapter also conceives of political dissent as a form of contentious politics, that is, a series of public, collective, and consequential claim-making transactions between claimants and their targets. Such claims are considered consequential because, if realized, they will impinge on the interests of at least one of the parties to the contentious interaction other than the claim-makers. They are political because the state is involved as targets, initiators of claims, or third parties (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001: 5; Tarrow and Tilly 2007: 438; Tilly 2008b: 5). Political dissent in the IRI has a marked common characteristic: it takes some form of Islamic dissent. This results from the ways in which the IRI state has constructed the contours of public politics since its establishment in 1979. The political regime—or the patterns of repeated interactions and relations among state authorities, major political actors, and citizens—in the IRI has been strongly shaped by the fact that the IRI has an Islamic revolutionary state. The dual character—being an Islamic state headed by a madrasa-trained Shi‘i jurisprudent ( faqih ) and an anti-imperialist Third World revolutionary state—has had a lasting impact on what claims and manners of claim-making are allowed, tolerated, and prohibited, as well as which actors are allowed or tolerated to make such claims publicly. In practical terms, this has meant that all contentious claims must be, and have been, aired as some sort of Islamic dissent. Contentious claims of secular nature in the sense of being, arguably, anti -religious claims are severely proscribed. But secular claims in other senses—be they institutional, doctrinal, or sociocultural—can be, and have been, expressed in some Islamic terms. This has enabled various actors within the IRI polity to publicly express a broad spectrum of different views and make claims against each other during the eventful three and a half decades since the 1979 Revolution. Despite the popular impression outside of Iran otherwise, the resultant public sphere in the IRI polity can be characterized as inherently pluralistic, albeit admittedly severely circumscribed both politically and socially. In the following, I will argue that the particular ways in which the public sphere is shaped by the Islamic revolutionary state go a long way toward explaining why significant political battles are fought culturally in the IRI. It is also my contention that the cultural focus combined with relational perspective on contentious politics that this chapter employs enhances our understanding of significant political dynamics in the IRI. Following Charles Tilly, I conceive of culture as ‘constitutive element of social relations’ (2008a: 183) and examine how culture as shared understandings and their representations constrains contentious interaction, thereby contributing to what may be considered the culturalization of significant contentious political interaction that unfolds in the IRI. To these ends, I will examine (1) the emergence of what I call postrevivalist Islamic dissent, and (2) the dynamics of contention on the institutionalized politics level and its connection with postrevivalist Islamic dissent. The concrete questions I will address are as follows: How did the rise of the Islamic revolutionary state shape the nature of public political contention in the Islamic Republic polity of