Editor's note: This dialogue is excerpted from www.bitterlemons-dialogue.org, where the full text may be found.

Shlomo Avineri, Jerusalem: Can an intellectual overcome the limitations of his age and society and jump over Rhodes (to use Hegel's memorable phrase)? Where does he get his values from, and how does he legitimize them within his own society?

Ramin Jahanbegloo, Teheran: I do believe that the role of the "intellectual" has been totally misunderstood and misinterpreted in the Middle Eastern countries, especially in the Arab countries, where, as you say, critical voices are rare when one has to choose between dictators like Saddam and democracy. Actually, if we make a comparison between the rise of intellectuals in the Middle East and the birth of "intellectualism" in Europe, we can see many differences.

The most important among these is what Max Weber calls the "disenchantment of the world." To my mind, Middle Eastern societies, and more especially Islamic countries, have not gone through this process of "disenchantment."

When we take a look at the birth of intellectuals in Europe (and more specifically after the Dreyfus affair), we see that they are the most important sociological actors of modernity. As a matter of fact, their struggle for critical rationality and civil liberties goes hand in hand with their critique and refusal of the spirit of domination.

Iranian elites started dealing with the issue of modernity 150 years ago after the Qajar defeat against the Russian army.

The 19th-century Iranian reformers whom we can consider the "first generation of Iranian intellectuals" were perfectly conscious of the fact that it was not enough to rely upon the antiquity of Iranian civilization to think about its continued survival. They tried to establish a relationship with men of power, but their blueprints naturally remained without immediate impact among the leaders to whom they were addressed. These intellectual reforms encountered a widespread opposition from the court and the Ulama.

Unlike the first generation of Iranian intellectuals, the second generation intended to introduce modern civilization to Iran, not only by imitating the West, but through a systematic approach to European culture.

Very different from the second generation, perceived as the heir of the Enlightenment, the third generation of Iranian intellectuals was mainly influenced by the totalitarian outlook of Russian Marxism. Post-revolutionary Iranian civil society is symbolized today, from my point of view, by a period of transition from utopian thinking and a quest for an "ideological modernity" to a non-imitative dialogical exchange with modernity and the West.

AVINERI: I was fascinated by your review of Iranian developments, which are so different from those in the Arab world. While I am not familiar with the different stages described by you, to my mind this explains a lot about current developments in Iran – and the basic deficit in parallel developments in Arab countries.

Jahanbegloo: Certainly the world has changed and so has Marxism, yet nationalism is more alive than ever, not only as a sense of belonging but also as a framework for political identity making. We can see this process very clearly in the contemporary history of the Middle East.

Let me take once again the Iranian example, but this analysis could be easily applied to Turkey. Both modern Iran and modern Turkey were shaped by nationalistic ideas, and there is no doubt in my mind that nationalism continues today to play a significant role in the social and political life of Turkish and Iranian citizens.

Evidence of nationalism in Iran is difficult to discover prior to the 19th century. We need to associate national identity in Iran with the cultural encounter of Iranian elites with the West after the Persian-Russian war.

The Constitutional Revolution of 1906 represented the entry of Iran into a new political era and created a series of clashes between traditional and modern political forces. Yet continuous foreign interference in the affairs of Iran helped to legitimize Islamic movements there as nationalistic powers.

With the Mossadegh failure in 1953, a new form of Iranian nationalism was promoted by the Islamic groups and the clergy in Iran. This process has been intensified in the past 26 years since the Iranian Revolution.

Even for the Islamic government, which has frequently stressed the role of Islam as a major source of identity as opposed to the secularism of the Pahlavi dynasty, Shi'ism seems to have provided a national collective consciousness that we can call "religious nationalism." The most obvious example of this is the use of the word "Iran" by the Islamic leadership since the war against Saddam in the 1980s. This recalls the vitality of nationalism in the Iranian political and cultural consciousness.

Today, secular nationalism is gaining ground among Iranian youth and even among devout Muslims in Iran. Such a development reminds me that because Islam was imported to Iran by the Arabs, it is not as central to Iranian identity as it is to Arab identity.

Five centuries ago, the Safavid dynasty conceived Shi'ism as an Iranianized Islam, largely to distinguish itself from Arabs and Ottoman Turks. Today, once again, Iranian nationalism is changing the Iranian political identity. But this time Iranian nationalism is looking toward a secular future.

AVINERI: I found your analysis of the Iranian Islamic Revolution in terms of the Iranian historical discourse fascinating – I can only wish more people outside Iran were aware of this. It certainly provides a key to the understanding of what happens in your country – and paves the way for hopeful developments in the future.

Jahanbegloo: If we come back for a moment to the issue of modernization, we can say that, in Europe as well as the Middle East, it has always involved a process of secularization, systematically displacing religious institutions with those of rationality.

Secularization in the Middle East can be dated back to the 19th century, when the impact of the secular West on Arab, Iranian and Turkish societies called for social, political and cultural reforms. However, if we take a closer look at this process we can see that it has gone through several different stages: radical secularization, followed by radical Islamization (as in the Iranian case), and again by a resurgent secularization.

Yet the relationship between secularization and democratization in the Middle East has been more complex than that experienced by the West. In many cases, nationalism and communism as secular modes of binding people in the Middle East retarded democratic development in this area of the world.

Middle Eastern societies came into direct contact with secularism as early as the first half of the 19th century, when they experienced military defeats against the West. The landing of Napoleon in Egypt in 1798, the loss of Greece by the Ottoman Empire, the defeat of Qajar Persia by Russia, were all shocks that awakened a secularization process. But without democratization; most of the reforms in the Middle East began first with the reorganization of the armies. In Iran, a French military mission was sent to assist Crown Prince Abbas Mirza in the task. In Egypt, an ambitious Albanian military officer named Mohammad Ali lead the secularization drive.

Thus, secularization in the Middle East has been generally authoritarian. This created an inherent power conflict in Egypt, Turkey and Iran between modernist elites and Islamist elites. However, even the most devout believers in the Islamic countries came to realize that western civilization only began to progress once it had separated the religious from the temporal in all spheres of life.

No matter how close Muslim scholars and intellectuals felt to their religion, the influence of western secularism on their thought has been undeniable in the past 60 years, and has only increased over time. Islamist movements in Iran, Turkey and Arab countries in the region have developed their own educated, technical and intellectual elites, which resemble the secular modernist elites they criticize.

Today, this process of elite formation among the Islamic movements is leading to de-facto secularization, making support for radical Islam less likely among elites in countries such as Egypt, Iran and Turkey.

Ramin Jahanbegloo is director of the Department of Contemporary Studies at the Cultural Research Bureau in Teheran and a professor of philosophy at Shahid Beheshti University. His books include Conversations with Isaiah Berlin and Iran: Between Tradition and Modernity. Shlomo Avineri is professor of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The writers are collaborating on a book of reflections on the Middle East.