Iranian principlists

The Principlists (Persian: اصول‌گرایان, romanized: Osul-Garāyān, lit. 'followers of principles^[11] or fundamentalists^[12]'), also known as the Iranian Conservatives^[13][14] and formerly known as the Right or Right-wing,^[15][16] are one of two main political factions in post-revolutionary Iran; the other being the Reformists.

The term hardliners that some western sources use to describe Iranian politicians, usually refer to this faction.^[17]

Within Iranian politics, "principlist" means the conservative supporters of the Supreme Leader of Iran and supports protecting the "principles" of the Islamic Revolution's early days.^[18]

1. ↑ Mehdi Mozaffari (2007), "What is Islamism? History and Definition of a Concept" (PDF), Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 8 (1): 17–33, doi:10.1080/14690760601121622, S2CID 9926518, In fact, Iranian 'Islamists' of our day call themselves 'Usul gara', which literally means 'fundamentalist', but in a positive sense. It designates a 'person of principles' who is the 'true Muslim'.
2. ↑ Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi (2013), "Women's Rights, Shari'a Law, and the Secularization of Islam in Iran", International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 26 (3), New York: 237–253, doi:10.1007/s10767-013-9143-x, S2CID 145213603, "Principlism" or osul-gera'i first appeared in the Iranian political lexicon during the second-term presidency of Mohammad Khatami as an alternative to eslāh-talabi or reformism. Although principlists do not share a uniform political platform, they all believed that the reformist movement would lead the Republic towards secularism. One of the most common elements of their political philosophy is the comprehensiveness of the shari'a. The responsibility of the Islamic state is to determine ways of implementing the mandates of Islam, rather than the reformist project of reinterpreting the shari'a to correspond to the demands of contemporary society.
3. ↑ Mohseni, Payam (2016). "Factionalism, Privatization, and the Political economy of regime transformation". In Brumberg, Daniel; Farhi, Farideh (eds.). Power and Change in Iran: Politics of Contention and Conciliation. Indiana Series in Middle East Studies. Indiana University Press. p. 47. ISBN 978-0253020680.
4. ↑ ^{4.0 4.1 4.2} Melody Mohebi (2014), The Formation of Civil Society in Modern Iran: Public Intellectuals and the State, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 129–131, ISBN 978-1-137-40110-6
5. ↑ Robert J. Reardon (2012), Containing Iran: Strategies for Addressing the Iranian Nuclear Challenge, RAND Corporation, pp. 81–82, ISBN 978-0833076373
6. ↑ Mehdi Moslem (2002), Factional Politics in Post-Khomeini Iran, Syracuse University Press, p. 135, ISBN 9780815629788
7. ↑ Tait, Robert (18 August 2010). "Iranian President's New 'Religious-Nationalism' Alienates Hard-Line Constituency". Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
8. ↑ "Iran's president-elect to be inaugurated in early August". www.english.news.cn. Retrieved 2024-07-08.
9. ↑ ^{9.0 9.1} "Freedom in the World: Iran", Freedom House, 2017, archived from the original on 17 May 2017, retrieved 25 May 2017
10. ↑ "Iran conservatives tighten grip on top oversight body", Agence France-Presse, Yahoo, 14 August 2017, archived from the original on 21 February 2019, retrieved 14 August 2017
11. ↑ Axworthy, Michael (2016), Revolutionary Iran: A History of the Islamic Republic, Oxford University Press, p. 430, ISBN 9780190468965
12. ↑ Kevan Harris (2017). A Social Revolution: Politics and the Welfare State in Iran. Univ of California Press. p. 157. ISBN 9780520280816. This discourse was eventually tagged with the Persian neologism osulgarāi, a word that can be translated into English as "fundamentalist", since "osul" means "doctrine", "root", or "tenet". According to several Iranian journalists, state-funded media were aware of the negative connotation of this particular word in Western countries. Preferring not to be lumped in with Sunni Salafism, the English-language media in Iran opted to use the term "principlist", which caught on more generally.
13. ↑ Said Amir Arjomand; Nathan J. Brown (2013). The Rule of Law, Islam, and Constitutional Politics in Egypt and Iran. SUNY Press. p. 150. ISBN 978-1-4384-4597-7. "Conservative" is no longer a preferred term in Iranian political discourse. "Usulgara", which can be clumsily translated as "principlist", is the term now used to refer to an array of forces that previously identified themselves as conservative, fundamentalist, neo-fundamentalist, or traditionalist. It developed to counter the term eslahgara, or reformist, and is applied to a camp of not necessarily congrous groups and individuals.
14. ↑ Randjbar-Daemi, Siavush (2012). "Glossary of the most commonly-used Persian terms and abbreviations". Intra-State Relations in the Islamic Republic of Iran: The Presidency and the Struggle for Political Authority, 1989-2009 (Ph.D. thesis). Martin, Vanessa (Supervisor). Royal Holloway, University of London. p. 11. Open access material licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
15. ↑ Haddad Adel, Gholamali; Elmi, Mohammad Jafar; Taromi-Rad, Hassan (2012-08-31). "Jāme'e-ye Rowhāniyyat-e Mobārez". Political Parties: Selected Entries from Encyclopaedia of the World of Islam. EWI Press. p. 108. ISBN 9781908433022.
16. ↑ Robin B. Wright, ed. (2010), The Iran Primer: Power, Politics, and U.S. Policy, US Institute of Peace Press, p. 37, ISBN 978-1601270849
17. ↑ Masoud Kazemzadeh (2008), "Intra-Elite Factionalism and the 2004 Majles Elections in Iran", Middle Eastern Studies, 44 (2): 189–214, doi:10.1080/00263200701874867, S2CID 144111986, In Western sources, the term "hard-liners" is used to refer to the faction under the leadership of Supreme Leader Ali Khamanehi. Members of this group prefer to call themselves Osul-gara. The word osul (plural of asl) means "fundamentals", or "principles" or "tenets", and the verbal suffix -gara means "those who uphold or promote". The more radical elements in the hard-line camp prefer to call themselves Ommat Hezbollah. Ommat is a technical Arabic-Islamic term referring to people who are Muslim. Hezbollah literally means "Party of Allah". Before the rise of Ahmadinejad to the presidency in 2005, many official sources in the Islamic Republic referred to this group as mohafezeh-kar ("conservative"). Between 1997 and 2006, many Iranians inside Iran used the terms eqtedar-gara ("authoritarian") and tamamiyat-khah ("totalitarian") for what many Western observers have termed "hard-liners". Members of the reformist faction of the fundamentalist oligarchy called the hard-liners eqtedar-gara.
18. ↑ Ladane Nasseri; Kambiz Foroohar; Yeganeh Salehi (June 16, 2013). "Iranians Celebrate Surprise Rohani Win as Reason for Hope". Bloomberg. Retrieved March 10, 2015.