About
Research Interests
I am currently in the preliminary stages of reframing and expanding my dissertation into a book, tentatively titled: The Politics of New Theology and Religious Intellectualism in the Islamic Republic of Iran. The book argues that unlike the almost universal Sunni and Shi’i Muslim reformist call for fine-tuning the Islamic legal system (fiqh and usul al-fiqh), certain strands of the intellectual reformist movement in Iran, frustrated with the ineffectuality of judicial reform in creating deep-seated change, has alternatively become “theological” in nature. This theological turn has resulted in the questioning of foundational issues such as (just to name a few) whether or not the Qur’an is in fact the word of God; the orthodoxy’s marginalization of rational opinion; the status of women in God’s eyes; the special status accorded to Muslims in the Holy Book in light of the reality of religious diversity; the possibility of salvation for the non-Muslim “Other”; and finally the political theological issue of guardianship and just rule. This distinction between the implementation of foundational religious change by revisiting theological questions as opposed to concentrating on legal innovation, is an important contemporary transformation in the strategies used by Muslim reformers. An insistence on reformulating creedal Islam shows an important tactical shift in the reformist agenda and points to a newfound courage in challenging ahistorical readings of the Qur’an. This paradigm shift, I argue, can play a definitive role in the future of Reformist Islam.
The current theological innovations in the Islamic Republic, called “New Theology” by its practitioners, I argue, belong either to a “Theology of Selectivity,” which is a daring reformulation of classical tenets, or “Postmodern Theology,” which breaks with tradition completely. The “Theology of Selectivity” is represented by the works of Ayatollah Mohsen Kadivar, Grand Ayatollah Yousef Sanei and the defrocked Hojjatoleslam Hassan Yousefi-Eshkevari, thinkers who epitomize the creative intellectual yet tradition-bound wave of post-revolutionary theological thought in Iran. The most innovative move made by these thinkers has been to elevate human rights precepts and, in some cases, even give them priority over certain Qur’anic verses, deemed historically obsolete. The problem with the “selectivity” school of thought is that it does not face the theological repercussions of elevating communal “human” wisdom at the expense of devaluing “the direct word of God.” Agreeing that the Charter of Human Rights (human wisdom) determines what is still valuable in the Qur’an, elevates the discourse around the Qur’an’s historicity to a whole new level—a level that Iranian postmodern theologians have argued inevitably questions the very creedal core of Islam. Postmodern Islamic Theology, represented by the works of Abdolkarim Soroush and Ayatollah Muhammad Mujtahid-Shabestari, has dared to undertake the task of overhauling a theology considered univocal and definitive on most creedal questions since the tenth century A.D. The work of both of these schools of theology (selective and postmodern) is revolutionary, and a comparative work between the two, highlights the boundary beyond which Islam changes creedal form. My work is a study of this boundary and the shape of these new Islams.