The Necessity of Rereading the History of Concepts in the Contemporary Iran

 One of the major reasons for not accessing a clear answer, in the spheres of thought and practice, to the question of how to enter the modern age while preserving the Islamic identity in the contemporary Iran is not having a right understanding of the concepts that entered the Islamic world and its political-social language in a confrontation between the Islamic traditions, especially the Islamic-Iranian tradition, and the modern tradition of the western Europe as well as its modern lifestyle. Thus, one of the basic tasks in the sphere of the political-social thought and practice is a systematic rereading of the history of those concepts. In the present article, we have attempted to do the reading of the history of thought through reading the history of concepts. Such a reading will provide us with the awareness and understanding of the facilities, limits, logic and the energy hidden in those concepts to open the way towards the modern age while preserving our Iranian-Islamic identity. This will be done through understanding those concepts and their proper location in our language, and will give us the ability to speak in the language of the modern age, making it possible to interact with other lingual traditions and lifestyles.

Keywords:

contemporary Iran , modern age , conceptual history , confrontation with the west