Islamic revolutionaries retained Western constitutional and legal forms while rejecting Western laws

Evidence

The Islamic Republic of Iran has a written constitution and an elected parliament, in which lively debates take place. None of these things existed in the Islamic past, and there has been no serious attempt to argue that they did. While Western-inspired laws have been abrogated and replaced by the Shari a, Western-style legal procedures remain, and there are courts and lawyers to administer them. These too are not insignificant remnants of the age of European influence. There has been no loss of interest—if anything rather an increase—in the study of foreign languages, and the books to which a knowledge of foreign language gives access. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1510

Categorization

• XREF: Complicates the clean ‘Islamic vs Western’ binary often applied in Said-adjacent critiques of how Iran’s revolution was narrated to Western audiences.
• QUESTION: Why exactly did the revolutionary regime retain parliament, courts, and foreign-language study if these were framed as Western imports? Worth investigating the internal Iranian debates.