Definition of Politics and Political Modernity. As has been shown in the preceding section, state officials, establishment elite, and Pan-Islamist intellectuals were encouraged within the arena of the ideological debates to offer personal definitions of both politics and political modernity. If the guidelines offered both an indication of the dilemmas of political reform and a delimitation of the arena for debate, the quest for definitions amounted to an attempt at outlining a possible normative approach to reflect the range of views on politics and political modernisation among reformers. Within the Iranian political culture it was expected that such informal and inherently variable definitions of political modernisation would be transformed into a single, formal and normative, which would clarify what exactly was to be the object of politics in the process of modernisation. Some senior officials put forward this approach in a general way in the first few years. In 1998 President Khatami warned that Parliament should not become a platform for factional politics. Parliament, according to President Khatami, was not a forum in which to debate factional politics: rather, it was to be used for making decisions on current modernisation affairs. Thus, political reforms would have to be debated as a part of government programmes. What meant by this was outlined in Tajzadeh’s article that: Political reform should have its own independent function and organisation in each branch of government.48 The idea was that as a part of the project of modernisation, political reform should find its natural structure and well-defined place, and aims. Initially, the IRI elite, state officials and Pan-Islamist intellectuals adopted the traditional approach of searching for modernisation in the canons of ‘Democratic Islam’ and applying them to Iran’s concrete context (Soroush, 1994). Politically, this approach may have been suggested out of caution in some cases. Political reform was thereby presented as a concrete example of linking the general project of modernity with the concrete practice of Islamic Republic. According to Mehdi Moslem, conservative reaction to reformer Aqajari’s statements was that reformers should not disregard all the assertions of the Ayatollah Khomeini that ‘I select government with the
