Mohammad Mahdi Mojahedi

The first part of my research examines the religious-secular bifurcation of political violence. I argue that this bifurcation is either redundant, when analyzed at the ontological level, or futile, when construed at the normative level. It is only at the level of the rationalization, i.e. justification and legitimization, of political violence that this bifurcation seems, prima facie, to hold. However, I argue that bifurcation, even on a rationalization level, does not survive closer examination. The next two parts of my research flesh out the theoretical ambivalence of the religious-secular dichotomy discussed in the first part. I contextualize disparate religious and secular rationalizations of political violence prior to and after the Constitutional Revolution in Iran (1905-07). Finally, I investigate the contexts through which these religious and secular discourses in Iran have substantively transmuted or, at least, influenced and reproduced one another.