Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "伊朗原则主义派" in Chinese language version.
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’.
“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.
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’ means ‘fundamentals’, or ‘principles’ or ‘tenets’. And the 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’.
What is important, however, is that the principlist camp now increasingly represents not just hardliners but also more centre-right factions.