ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on debates about the traditionality or modernity of radical Islam, and in particular the debates surrounding Khomeini’s social and political thought. The difficulty in classifying contemporary Islamic identities within the arrangement of modern-postmodern vocabulary emphasizes the partiality and Western focus of these debates. Much of the discussion around religious traditionality and modernity hinges around a third extraordinarily difficult concept: authenticity. Indeed, ideologies of authenticity can embrace quite neatly questions of authorship, origin, accuracy, representation, truth and reality, all of which can have clear religious undertones. The ambiguous late modern relationship between tradition and authenticity is vastly exploited in authoritarian religious movements. In several important ways, the various aporias in Khomeinism seem definitive in addressing the question of their modernity. Importantly, Khomeinism like much Islamic revivalist ideology, has extraordinarily little to say about its key founding concepts.
