THE SOCIAL BASES AND DISCURSIVE CONTEXT OF THE RISE OF ISLAMIC FUNDAMENTALISM - THE CASES OF IRAN AND SYRIA

This article focuses on the socioeconomic and political context of the 1950s and 1960s to explain the rise of fundamentalism in Iran and Syr ia. I argue that Islamic fundamentalism in these countries gained supp ort from certain traditional property-owning classes who were antagoni zed by the state economic policies and bureaucratic expansion and by t he state's effective suppression of the ideological and political plur alism of the earlier period. The state's repressive policies channeled oppositional politics through the medium of religion. I further argue that the more immediate determinant of Islamic fundamentalism was the state's ideology and its intervention in culture production. The stat e shaped the identity of the opposition and structured the kind of arg ument the opposition formulated against it. On the basis of the empiri cal cases of Iran and Syria, I argue that conceptualizing ideology as a discourse resolves some of the difficulties involved in the subjecti ve/psychological conception of ideology in the analysis, assessment, a nd understanding of the way ideology is produced and its role in socia l process, particularly when only historical materials are available. I also argue for treating ideology as an autonomous category with a dy namic of its own. Finally, I suggest a model of ideological production .