Khomeynī's doctrine of the Guardianship of the jurist (velāyat-e faqīh) enshrined in the Islamic Republic’s Constitution revolutionized Shiite law while perpetuating the legal dualism established in the Qājār period. This dualism, already central during the Constitutional Revolution (1905-1911), has been exacerbated in the new state of 1979: the scope of Islamic law (fiqh) expanded within state law. This dichotomy in force in Iran has generated many doctrinal controversies. Indeed, jurists and philosophers of law highlighted the intrinsic paradoxes of the heterogeneity of law and its practical inconsistencies. It encouraged them to elaborate a new epistemology of law. Rather than the dominant metaphysical and heteronomous conception of law endorsed by preeminent clerics such as ‘Abdollāh Javādī Amolī (b. 1933), they promote an effective and human rights-oriented approach. Moreover, unlike the dominant apologetic and ideological reading, they favor a critical and historical approach. Their goal is no longer to elaborate an ideal Islamic government or state-building as in the 1980s, but rather to perpetuate the state. To do so, they analyze the relation between the Islamic Republic and Islamic law from a new perspective and with a new methodology. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how Islamic law is gradually reconsidered as a historical and patrimonial element of law, rather than a structuring element. More specifically, we focus on a new legal thinking undergoing at Shahid Beheshti University Law Faculty in Tehran since the 2000-2010s. Jurists and philosophers of law including Mohammad Rāsekh (b. 1963) are elaborating modern theories of law. Observing the immobility (rokūd) of law as a result of the legal duality, as well as the inability of fiqh to answer modern legal questions, they call for a reform of law. Islamic law should no longer be the “center of gravity” of law but rather a “transition period”. While the current regime’s law primarily focuses on the expediency of the regime (maslahat), it is inevitable in modern times to enshrine individuality in modern law to guarantee the realization of human rights. Therefore, rather than a metaphysical and ideal conception of law, this tendency favors a pragmatic approach based on political effectiveness and inclusion of believers and non-believers. This new epistemology of law envisions sharī’a and fiqh as a part of a moral system rather than norms regulating daily life.

As debates intensify inside contemporary Iran around growing material inequality, ‘neoliberalism’ and corruption, new political movements and groupings, both loyal to the nezam such as the Edatlat khahan (Justice seekers), as well as those antagonistic toward it exemplified by the labor organizer and activist Esma’il Bakhsi, have sought to make their voices heard. In light of the growing salience and public awareness of economic inequality and class cleavages afflicting Iranian society, this paper will revisit the political and economic thought of Ayatollah Mahmoud Taleqani (d. 1979), a founding member of the Liberation Movement of Iran (Nehzat-e azadi-ye Iran), whose contributions to Islamic and normative political theory prefigure many of the challenges present-day critics of Iranian capitalism have sought to bring to the forefront. While Taleqani’s thought has been previously explored by scholars, this paper seeks to bring together in systematic fashion two integral components of his analysis which latter-day critics either hold to be mutually exclusive or miss altogether. These are 1) Taleqani’s powerful moral critique of capitalism in view of its reification of human social relations and the manner in which capitalism disaggregates the economic and political spheres through processes of marketization and commodification. Taleqani is also attentive to the ways in which human beings are inclined to forge new forms of protection and resilience against the depredations of the market strongly redolent of Karl Polanyi’s famous notion of the “double movement” as laid out in The Great Transformation, and 2) Taleqani’s arguments for an economic social order geared around human needs and realized through the principles of economic and political self-organization and democratic self-rule. The paper will place Taleqani’s thought in critical dialogue with the traditions of guild socialism and socialist communitarianism, which resonate with forms and norms of socio-economic organization possessing a longstanding history within Iran itself. Taleqani’s own vision would go on to have a tremendous influence in the political climate and constitutional debates following the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and outspoken demands for council democracy. Even if ultimately stunted, the core elements of Taleqani’s normative critique and vision have continued to capture the political imagination of Iranians striving for a more humane economic order in which democratic and economic self-organization are held to be central.

The reformist movement of religious intellectuals that flourished from the late 1980s grew out of the existing movement of the new theology (kalām-i jadīd). This intellectual movement was articulated through an instrumentalization of traditional seminarian philosophy to address the intellectual challenges of the post-war, postcolonial period in Iran (and Iraq) within the sphere of Shiʿi thought. A prominent intellectual foundation for the new theology was ʿAllāmeh Sayyid Muḥammad Ḥusayn Ṭabāṭabāʾī (d. 1981), leading teacher of philosophy at Qum, whose defence of metaphysical realism alongside a rejection of moral realism was critically important for reformist thought. In particular, I shall examine his notion of conceptual notions as a feature of the embodied, socially embedded nature of human practical reason that suggests a coherentist approach to moral truths and rejects the ascription of absolute and immutable value to them. While the early reception and teaching of Ṭabāṭabāʾī’s work, his polemical Uṣūl-i falsafeh va ravish-i riʾālizm that focused on rejecting idealism and dialectical materialism and his metaphysics ‘textbook’ Bidāyat al-ḥikma, focused on the defence of naïve realism and the possibility of a metaphysics of the immaterial and the intelligible (culminating in the proof for the existence of such a God), the ethical implications of realm of the conceptual notions that had no referent in extra-mental reality were largely set aside. After presenting his scheme of how these concepts make the moral universe, I will consider three questions: why did the ethical turn in the reading of Ṭabāṭabāʾī take place; what has the nature of the reception of his thought in recent debates in ethics in Iran been; and to what extent can a coherentist pragmatics and even a constructionalist approach to ethics (following pragmatic philosophers such as Nelson Goodman) arise from Ṭabāṭabāʾī’s thought? If ethical and political norms established in the political theology of the new Iranian state are conceptual and indeed conventional, then the possibilities of reform are extensive and exciting.

From the late 1980s onwards, several prominent Iranian philosophers and theologians questioned the notion of religious reform in Islam. While following in the wake of earlier contemporary “reformers”, both Sunni and Shi’i, ‘Abd ol-Karîm Sorûsh distanced himself from them from the vantage point of epistemology. Indeed, he engaged in an epistemological critique of Islamic religious knowledge (macrefat-e dînî) and envisioned diverse ways of “new theology” (kalâm-e jadîd). In turn and throughout his own endeavor to elaborate a new – or modern (jadîd) – Islamic theology, Mohammad Mojtahed Shabestarî has taken stock of alleged and actual attempts at religious reform. In addition, Mostafâ Malekiyân expounded a typology of reforms that sheds light onto the distinct intellectual and sociopolitical contexts of mid- and late 20th century Iran. Parallel to these philosophical approaches to the modern history of religious knowledge, religious legal scholars such as shaykh Mohsen Kadîwar assessed the contemporary developments in Shiite Islamic law (fiqh) and more broadly the historical evolutions of the Shiite political and legal tradition. Such assessments and others in the same line exemplify the critical turn that occurred in the last decade of the twentieth century in Shiite thought and especially in Iran. This very turn requires and allows a reassessment of the historiography of religious thought and institutions in contemporary Iran and Islam in general. First, instead of apprehending all changes through the lens of “reform” and “modernism”, one must distinguish the fields and disciplines in which intended and real changes were made. Second, we can distinguish the specific temporalities of each discipline of Islamic religious knowledge. Third, the contemporary history of Islamic theology can be divided into four periods or moment. Sorûsh ushered into the fourth period, which has spanned the last three decades and still continues. Together with Sorûsh, Mojtahed Shabestarî, Malekiyân, and Kadîwar developped comprehensive epistemological and methodological critiques of religious knowledge and Islamic heritage as well. Accordingly, “new theology” was first a critical break from the century-old tradition of religious knowledge. However, these authors and others have also lain the foundations for an actual new theology. In this purpose, they have elaborated new definitions of faith and religious experience. They have reconsidered the Shiite theology of religions and the issue of religious pluralism. Lastly, some of them ventured into the questioning of dogmas.