In this paper I examine contemporary Iranian scholastic debates over the relationship between religious experts and the commons (`amm). In particular, I examine the ways in which Muslim Iranian scholars—writing in journals published by private individuals, the Islamic colleges (hawzah), and the state—figure the role of the religious expert as both theologically necessary and circumscribed by human limitations. Current literature on Iranian reformism has broached this question of Islamic scholarship and its methods largely through writings on Islamic jurisprudence. Works such as Mehran Kamrava’s Iran’s Intellectual Revolution (2008) have demonstrated the importance of independent reasoning (ijtihad) for reformist arguments as well as moves among reformists to broaden the bases of legal thought. Dahlen Askh, focusing specifically on Islamic legal theory (usul), has analyzed a variety of positions on the role of human reason in uncovering (or creating) Islamic legal rulings (2003). Here, I draw on this earlier work to analyze debates over the nature of religious expertise and how that expertise ought to be applied in modernity. Rather than juxtaposing the modernist or liberal elements of reformist theories against “traditionalist” or conservative approaches to Islam, I place reformist hermeneutics in a genealogy of modern Islamic thought including scholars such as Ruhollah Khomeini and Muhammad Husayn Tabatabai. I argue that while many reformist, conservative, and traditionalist scholars assert the necessity of religious expertise for Islamic communities, the ways in which they figure the commons differ radically. Drawing on Talal Asad’s theories of secularization and statism (2003) I highlight the ways in which Islamic scholars engage with the very modern problems of egalitarian citizenship. Significantly, I suggest this question of citizenship has transformed Muslim Iranian scholarship and defines one of the particular problematics that figure Islamic debates in the present regardless of the individual scholar’s political position.