Shabestari belongs to the post-revolutionary generation of thinkers in Iran who, from within an Islamic perspective, have developed a discourse that contains important elements of humanism. His thought is strongly grounded in an Islamic worldview, but he has utilized a hermeneutic approach that posits human agency and its corollary, basic elements of human rights. This paper closely examines the thought of Shabestari and its implications for the reform of religion in Iran.

Mohammad Mojtahed Shabestari has publicly called for the acceptance of a scientific, critical-historical approach to the study of the Qur’an and the Sunnah. A scientific study of the religious sources, their evolution and redaction, Shabestari suggests, would not harm the appeal of revelation, but to the contrary, strengthen religious belief. The paper examines the secular hermeneutic Shabestari develops in relation to this critical-historical approach and the implications it has for the nature of social order and political power.

In this paper, I will first discuss the merits of distinguishing four types of modern religious thinkers—namely, modernists, revivalists, postrevivalist religious intellectuals, and postrevivalist thinkers of religion—in the predominantly Shi‘i Islamic Iranian context. I will argue that although meant to mainly serve heuristic purposes, these distinctions not only help dissect the complex amalgams in each thinker’s thought but also help place each of them in broader and interactive historical tendencies. I will also argue that it is crucial, among others, to understand how postrevivalist religious intellectuals and thinkers of religion set themselves apart from their revivalist predecessors while having been influenced by them. I will then highlight the case of Mohsen Kadivar (1959- ), a prolific author and lecturer originally trained in the Qom Islamic seminary, to illustrate how a postrevivalist thinker of religion has combined the modernist and revivalist elements in his thought. While the way he poses questions and the kind of answers he provides reveal the modernist side of his postrevivalist thought, his committed and socially embedded engagement in various sociopolitical issues of the time echoes the manners of many of his revivalist predecessors. Drawing, among others, on his advocacy of “spiritual and goal-oriented Islam,” I will also underline the kind of potential challenges that a postrevivalist thinker of religion could pose, particularly, to the revivalist religio-political establishment of today’s Iran. I will argue that such advocacy constitutes a serious discursive challenge to the establishment as it represents a well-thought-out internal criticism by a mujtahid of the very revivalist doctrinal expansion that Ayatollah Khomeini introduced during his reign of the Islamic state. This aspect set postrevivalist news thinkers of religion apart from their lay postrevivalist counterparts, or religious intellectuals such as Abdolkarim Sorush, and may prove more consequential in the years to come due to their relative genealogical closeness to Iran’s postrevolutionary religio-political establishment.