Contemporary Approaches to the Qurʾān and Its Interpretation in Iran

This book sets out how contemporary Iranian scholars have approached the Qurʾān during recent decades. It particularly aims to explore the contributions of scholars in the post-1979 Revolution era, outlining their primary interpretative methods and foundational theories regarding the reading of the Qurʾān. Examining issues such as the status of women, democracy, freedom of religion and human rights, this book analyses the theoretical contributions of several Iranian scholars, some of them new to the English-speaking academy. The hermeneutical approaches of figures such as Abdolkarim Soroush, Muhammad Mojtahed Shabestari, Mohsen Kadivar, Hasan Yousefi-Eshkevari, Abolqasem Fanaie and Mostafa Malekian are presented and then analysed to demonstrate how a contextualist approach to the Qurʾān has been formed, in part, in response to the influence of Western orientalism. The effect of this approach to the Qurʾān is then shown to have wide-ranging effects on Iranian society. This study reveals key areas of Qurʾānic thought that have been largely overlooked by scholars outside Iran. It will, therefore, be of great use to students and scholars of religious, Islamic and Qurʾānic studies, as well as those studying the culture of Iran and the Middle East more generally.

Ali Akbar is a researcher at the Asia Institute, University of Melbourne, Australia, where he received his PhD in Islamic Studies.

Abdullah Saeed is the Sultan of Oman Professor of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia, and the Advisor to the Studies in Interreligious Relations in Plural Societies Programme (SRP), RSIS, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Contemporary Thought in the Islamic World Series editor: Carool Kersten, King’s College London, UK

Contemporary Thought in the Islamic World promotes new directions in scholarship in the study of Islamic thinking. Muslim scholars of today chal- lenge deeply ingrained dichotomies and binaries. New ideas have stimulated an upcoming generation of progressive Muslim thinkers and scholars of Islam to radically rethink the ways in which immediate and emergent issues affecting the contemporary Islamic world are to be assessed. This series aims to take the field beyond the usual historical-philological and social science- driven approaches, and to insert the study of Islam and the Muslim world into far wider multi-disciplinary inquiries on religion and religiosity in an increasingly interconnected world.

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A Muslim Response to Evil Said Nursi on the Theodicy Tubanur Yesilhark Ozkan

A Muslim Reformist in Communist Yugoslavia The Life and Thought of Husein Đozo Sejad Mekić

Contemporary Thought in the Muslim World Trends, Themes, and Issues Carool Kersten

Contemporary Approaches to the Qurʾan and Its Interpretation in Iran Ali Akbar and Abdullah Saeed

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ religion/series/ACONTISLAM Contemporary Approaches to the Qurʾān and Its Interpretation in Iran

Ali Akbar and Abdullah Saeed First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Ali Akbar and Abdullah Saeed The right of Ali Akbar and Abdullah Saeed to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested

ISBN: 9780367272036 (hbk) ISBN: 9780367272067 (ebk)

Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC Notes on transliteration and other conventions

Arabic and Persian words except names of people are transliterated accord- ing to the following table:

ذ dh ص ṣ ط ṭ ث th غ gh خ kh ح ḥ ء ʾ ع ʿ ق q ا Long vowel ā ي Long vowel ī و Long vowel ū

Names of people are not transliterated but ʾ and ʿ are often used to distin- guish between the hamza and ʿayn respectively. The year of death of early Muslim scholars is given both in Common Era (CE) and Islamic calendar (AH), but that of modern Muslim scholars is only given in the Common Era. In quotations, words that are included in square brackets [] are ours.

Contents

PART I Introduction and reception of Western scholars’ approaches to the Qurʾān in Iran 1

Introduction 3 1 Reception of Western scholars’ approaches to the Qurʾān in Iran: orientalism refuted 11

PART II Approaches of contextualist Iranian scholars towards interpretation of the Qurʾān 49

2 Abdolkarim Soroush 57 3 Muhammad Mojtahed Shabestari 75 4 Hasan Yousefi-Eshkevari 89 5 Mohsen Kadivar 102 6 Abolqasem Fanaei 112 7 Mostafa Malekian 119

PART III Contextualist approaches in practice 129

8 Gender issues 131 9 Pluralism and freedom of religion 144 10 Human rights, democracy and methods of governance 155 viii Contents PART IV Concluding remarks 175

Bibliography 178 Index 188 Part I Introduction and reception of Western scholars’ approaches to the Qurʾān in Iran

Introduction Introduction Introduction, Western scholars’ approaches

This book is an attempt to present to English-speaking audiences an out- line of how particular contemporary Iranian scholars have approached the interpretation of the Qurʾān during the past few decades (1990s–2010s). It examines discussions among Iranian scholars about the Qurʾān and meth- ods of its interpretation in the post-Revolutionary era. The book begins with an exploration of how ideas about Qurʾānic stud- ies in the West have been received by Iranian religious scholars, especially from the conservative camps. Then it explores contextualist approaches to interpreting the Qurʾān developed by reformist Iranian scholars. The book shows how contextualisation, as a new discourse, has emerged among some reformist Iranian scholars in their approaches to the Qurʾān during the 1990s–2010s. Finally, the book demonstrates how contextualist inter- pretations of the Qurʾān in the works of reformist scholars have broader sociopolitical implications since they favour the mutability of the Qurʾān’s sociolegal rulings (aḥkām) today. Some of the questions that shape the major concerns of this study include the following: How have some conservative Iranian scholars responded to Qurʾānic studies undertaken in the West? To what extent are contextualist approaches to interpreting the Qurʾān highlighted in the works of reformist Iranian scholars, particularly during the past three decades? What are some of the implications of a contextualist reading of the Qurʾān? How have con- textualist Iranian scholars been able to interpret the Qurʾān in light of the new challenges posed by the modern world? To what extent have they been able to use their contextualist approaches to the Qurʾān to develop a project of reform – one that responds to the issues of human rights, religious plural- ism and gender equality?

A brief overview of the major themes of contextualisation Although the notion of contextualisation is dealt with in greater detail in Part II of this book, here we outline some of the main features of a contextu- alist approach to the Qurʾān to give readers a sense of what contextualisation 4 Introduction, Western scholars’ approaches means. Contextualisation is an umbrella term that covers a number of approaches to interpreting the Qurʾān. Although we do not intend to claim that contextualist scholars form an entirely homogenous group, a contextu- alist approach, broadly speaking, looks at the Qurʾān in light of the histori- cal context of its revelation. A contextualist approach takes into account the broader social, cultural, political and economic milieu in which the Qurʾān was revealed. Contextualists often distinguish between universal and par- ticular verses. That is, they differentiate between Qurʾānic verses that only apply to specific conditions and those that apply to humans more generally. Another interpretative method highlighted in the work of some contextu- alist scholars is intra-textual reading, which implies that the Qurʾān should be treated holistically. Thus, instead of reading Qurʾānic verses – especially those dealing with sociolegal issues – in isolation, readers should seek to understand these verses through the prism of the rest of the text. In other words, Qurʾānic verses – especially those related to sociolegal matters – should be interpreted in light of the Qurʾān’s underlying principles and the Qurʾān’s overall movement towards advancing justice for humans.1 For contextualists, in the same way that the historical context of the Qurʾān influenced its content, the historical contexts and environments of its interpreters have played a key role in its interpretations. In this sense, contextualists often argue that it is important to draw a close connection between the context in which the Qurʾān was revealed – referred to by Abdullah Saeed as macro context 1 – and the context in which the Qurʾān is being interpreted today – referred to as macro context 2. To “translate” the Qurʾān from macro context 1 to macro context 2, an interpreter must be aware of both contexts.2 This view is often used by contextualists to argue in favour of the idea that the “meanings” of some Qurʾānic passages, espe- cially those connected to sociolegal matters, can be different for a contem- porary reader than they would have been for the original seventh-century audience of the text. In this sense, in moving from macro context 1 to macro context 2, “there may have been a socio-historical background and context that warranted [a specific legislation]; when the situation changes . . . the law has to be rethought anew”.3 It is worth noting that the theme of the historical contextualisation of the Qurʾān has been, broadly speaking, emphasised in the writings of Western scholars. Beginning in the nineteenth century, Western scholars of Islam began to look at traditional approaches to interpreting the Qurʾān differently. Although Muslim scholars had occasionally attempted to con- nect individual revelations with the events of the Prophet’s life in order to discover the context of specific Qurʾānic revelations, they, as Munim Sirry argued, “vehemently refused to attribute the Qurʾān to the evolution of the Prophet’s spiritual life and his religious and political problems and strate- gies”.4 “Most Muslim scholars”, according to Sirry, “do not welcome the emphasis on the environmental influence on the Qurʾān as it implies that the Qurʾān is of human rather than divine origin”.5 Introduction 5 The idea that the Qurʾān should be understood in light of the Prophet’s biography and the events that the nascent Muslim community experienced was highlighted in early Western Qurʾānic scholarship, including the works of Theodor Nöldeke, Friedrich Schwally and Otto Pretzl.6 Indeed, it was in the mid-nineteenth century that the discipline of the history of the Qurʾān emerged in the West. Western scholars from the nineteenth century onwards frequently emphasised that the Qurʾān was the product of a milieu in which Jewish, Christian and even Zoroastrian teachings were prevalent. Accord- ingly, they often attempted to discover possible connections between the Qurʾān and Judeo-Christian ideas. Such ideas have arisen more generally to argue for the Qurʾān’s dependency on the Bible.7 Many orientalists – except those who argue that the Qurʾān – in its current version – dates from much later than the time of Muhammad or even the caliph Uthman – believe that the sociopolitical, intellectual and cultural contexts of Arabia during the seventh century played a key role in shaping the content of the Qurʾān. While the Qurʾān itself does not contain a record of the historical events that Muhammad experienced while he lived in both Mecca and Medina, these events and the prevailing cultural elements of Arabian society, some argue, still played an important role in the formation of the text. The theme of the historical contextualisation of the Qurʾān can also be found in the writings of Muslim contextualist scholars, as we demonstrate in the second part of this book. However, it is essential to highlight from the outset that there is an important difference between the notion of context emphasised by Muslim contextualist scholars and that emphasised by non- Muslim scholars in the West. While Muslim contextualist scholars, includ- ing Iranian contextualist scholars, emphasise the influence of context and history when interpreting the Qurʾān, they do not, in general, question the essentially divine nature of the text. However, Western academic tradition has been concerned mainly with discovering the context of the text in a way that helps identify the different stages through which the Qurʾān came into being. The very nature of the Qurʾān, according to this Weltanschauung, or worldview, is that it is mostly connected to contextual and human elements, such as Muhammad’s personality, his biography and his familiarity with earlier religious scriptures, as well as the sociocultural norms of Arabian society and the historical events that he and the nascent Muslim community confronted. Indeed, the idea that the Qurʾān is of a divine origin is not a cen- tral theme in Western/non-Muslim scholarship. While it is not surprising for a non-Muslim scholar to question the divine nature of the Qurʾān, Muslim scholars – be they reformist or conservative – do not generally do so.

Contextualisation in response to the discourses of conservative theologians As we demonstrate in the first two parts of this book, although the discourse of orientalism has, by and large, been challenged by conservative Iranian 6 Introduction, Western scholars’ approaches scholars and researchers, it has left an impact on the intellectual climate of Iranian scholarship, especially within religious intellectual circles. One particular impact has been the influence of methods of historical contex- tualisation. By delving into the theories, ideas and approaches of particu- lar reformist Iranian scholars to the Qurʾān, this book intends to provide insight into the ongoing project of contextualisation in Iran. It is worth noting that reformist scholars’ contextualist readings of the Qurʾān are also reactions to the conservative theological discourses that came to shape the foundation of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The rise of political Islam, which was felt during the 1979 Iranian Revolution, even- tually led to a debate among Iranian scholars on the place of pluralism, freedom, democracy and individual rights in Islam. It is within this con- text that some religious intellectuals (rowshanfekrān-e dīnī), from the early 1990s onwards, began to reconsider traditional approaches to interpreting the Qurʾān. The ideas of these religious intellectuals, as demonstrated in this book, challenged the religious authority of traditionally educated Muslim scholars, although there was some variance among religious intellectuals in how strongly they distanced themselves from conservatives. Given that the Qurʾān is considered a rich resource for theological debate and sociopolitical action in Iran because of the central place of religion in the public space, debates between conservative and reformist religious schol- ars – be they clerics or lay intellectuals – about social issues are often referred to the Qurʾān. For conservative religious scholars, the unique nature of the Qurʾān as the direct Word of God means that it must be placed over all other texts – which are inherently fallible; thus, it is a significant point of depar- ture for sociopolitical decision-making in society. In addition, conservative theologians in Iran have produced a considerable volume of writings on the immutability of the Qurʾān’s teachings on sociolegal issues. As Ahmad Vaʿezi (b. 1962), a conservative theologian and instructor at the ḥowzeh of Qom, wrote: “Not all changes lead to changes in the nature of Qurʾānic commandments. Therefore, we cannot ignore the injunctions of the Shariʿa based on external and contextual changes, and instead replace the unshak- able commands of the Shariʿa with conjectures and guesses”.8 Like Vaʿezi, Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi (b. 1935), who is often identified as “the most conservative among Iran’s clerical elite”,9 argues against the mutability of the Qurʾān’s teachings on sociolegal issues. For him, the traditional Islamic jurisprudential discourse should be applied in its entirety today. Reinterpre- tation of the primary sources of Islam is not necessary: “The Islam that we believe in is what has been interpreted by the Twelve Imams and, alongside them, by fourteen centuries of juridical work by the ulama”.10 Accordingly, Mesbah Yazdi suggested, “If there are new interpretations that call for alter- ations to the teachings of Islam and the creation of a new Islam, we want nothing to do with it”.11 As argued in the third part of this book, despite the emphasis on the immutable nature of the Qurʾān’s sociolegal teachings often found in the writings of conservative Iranian theologians, central to Introduction 7 the projects of religious intellectuals is the idea that a large number of such teachings and commandments are subject to change and can be applied dif- ferently depending on the specific time and place.

Methodology and contributions of this book Our criteria for selecting certain Iranian scholars for examination in the second and third parts of the book were not the scholars’ popularity or number of followers, or even the circulation of their writings and lectures. Instead, scholars such as Abdolkarim Soroush (b. 1945), Muhammad Moj- tahed Shabestari (b. 1936), Hasan Yousefi-Eshkevari (b. 1950), Mohsen Kadivar (b. 1959), Abolqasem Fanaei (b. 1960) and Mostafa Malekian (b. 1956) were selected for their contributions towards shaping a new trend in contemporary Qurʾānic studies and Islamic thought in Iran – a trend that revolves around the re-examination of traditional approaches to Qurʾānic interpretation. In addition, we chose these scholars for analysis because their methods of interpretation serve as a means of establishing a theoreti- cal foundation that will advance a project of reform to address sociopo- litical issues such as social and gender justice, religious pluralism and the role of religion in governance. Therefore, this book not only provides an exploration of the approaches of Iranian reformist scholars to interpreting the Qurʾān, but also contributes to the broader debate on: 1) whether reli- gion can contribute to promoting ideas such as gender equality in society; 2) whether religion, if it continues to have a presence in the public sphere, is compatible with democracy and contemporary discourses on human rights; and 3) whether a contextualist reading of the Qurʾān can promote religious pluralism and freedom of religion in a Muslim-majority country like Iran, where Islam is the state religion. The approach employed in this book, especially in the second and third parts, is primarily comparative and analytical in nature. Therefore, we not only explore the hermeneutics of religious intellectuals such as Soroush, Shabestari, Kadivar, Eshkevari, Fanaei, Ahmad Qabel, Mohsen Saidzadeh and Malekian to determine their contributions to the contextualisation dis- course in Iran, but also compare their discourses to one another. We show the extent to which each of these scholars has distanced himself from tradi- tional approaches to revelation and the Qurʾān. In this sense, the book seeks to provide a contribution to the critical study of hermeneutics in contempo- rary Iranian-Islamic scholarship. It should be noted, however, that the aforementioned scholars have not produced a single-volume text devoted solely to their Qurʾānic commentary. Rather, their work in hermeneutics is often spread across several books and articles produced by them. We extract the main features of each scholar’s hermeneutical approach from these works and attempt to piece together his ideas to present a coherent picture. Thus, a significant portion of the material covered in the second and third parts of this book rely on the 8 Introduction, Western scholars’ approaches aforementioned scholars’ writings. We recount their ideas in the form of either long passages or short quotations inter-mingled with our own com- ments. Translations of direct quotes from Persian are ours, unless other- wise stated. When translating from Persian to English, we have tried to be as faithful as possible to the original texts. As such, we have frequently included square brackets with our own words for clarification.

Chapters of the book The book is divided into three parts, each of which develops a particular argument. Part I explores how some of the main features of the discourses of orientalism and Western studies on the Qurʾān have been perceived by Iranian scholars and researchers. We explore the ideas of some Iranian scholars, especially from conservative circles, that have been developed in response to such studies from the West. We argue that a discourse has been articulated in Iran during the 1990s–2010s, principally through journal arti- cles and conferences, in which Western scholars’ ideas about the Qurʾān have been strongly criticised. This discourse is mainly perpetuated by con- servative religious scholars and is in line with the critiques of orientalism in some other Muslim-majority countries, especially the Arab states. The second and third parts of this book highlight the evolving nature of the ideas of Iranian scholars on the interpretation of the Qurʾān, with specific reference to the issues that have become important to modern sociopolitical debates. Part II consists of a hermeneutical study of the ideas of contextualist Iranian scholars on the Qurʾān. We do not claim to have been able to cover all the main Iranian thinkers who have contributed to the emergence of contextualist approaches to the Qurʾān. Given the lim- ited space available, we have selected six major Iranian scholars: Soroush, Shabestari, Kadivar, Eshkevari, Fanaei and Malekian. Therefore, the sec- ond part of the book comprises six chapters, each of which is devoted to one of the aforementioned scholars, some of whose ideas have not yet been introduced to English audiences. Each chapter begins with key biographi- cal information about the scholar and then describes his interpretative method. It asks these questions about the scholar’s project: How should the Qurʾān be interpreted? Is it necessary to re-examine traditional theories of revelation when interpreting the text? What are the principal hermeneuti- cal approaches used to interpret the Qurʾān? What are the problems with traditional modes of interpretation? We argue in this part of the book that contextualist discourses – akin to those in the writings of many orientalists and other Muslim contextualist scholars like Fazlur Rahman, Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, Ebrahim Moosa, Abdullah Saeed and Farid Esack – are apparent in the work of the aforementioned Iranian scholars. The third part of the book, which itself is divided into three chapters, demonstrates how the hermeneutical approaches of contextualist schol- ars function in practice. To show how the scholars have applied their Introduction 9 hermeneutical approaches, we have selected three issues that have been the subject of scholarly debate in Iran during the past few decades. Each of these themes – gender issues, religious pluralism and freedom of religion, and discourses concerning democracy and human rights – constitutes the topic of a chapter. Each chapter has an introduction that contextualises the main discussion and provides important information that is directly relevant to the section’s main themes. This part of the book, therefore, contributes to the general debate on secularism, public expression of religion, gender issues and religious pluralism among Muslims. It demonstrates how these impor- tant themes, which Muslim scholars from other countries are also debating at the present time, are being explored by contextualist Iranian scholars. It also shows the extent to which these themes are rooted in their own contex- tualist readings of the Qurʾān. This book is distinguished from most scholarship in the realm of Iranian or Islamic studies in that it does not only focus on methods of Qurʾānic inter- pretation from a contextualist perspective, nor simply highlight the projects of contextualist scholars like Soroush, Shabestari, Kadivar and Eshkevari as symbolic of a liberal turn among contemporary Muslim scholars. Rather, it demonstrates how a contextualist reading of the Qurʾān can influence a scholar’s perspective on issues pertaining to the sociopolitical realm. Indeed, unlike some literature on contemporary Islamic reform that focuses on the Sharīʿa alone,12 this book – particularly in its second and third parts – pays specific attention to reformism based on the Qurʾān.13

Notes 1 For a review of the contextualist approach to the Qurʾān, see Abdullah Saeed, “Some Reflections on the Contextualist Approach to Ethico-Legal Texts of the Qurʾān”, Bulletin of School of Oriental and African Studies 71, no. 2 (2008): 221–37. 2 Abdullah Saeed, Reading the Qurʾān in the Twenty-First Century: A Contextual- ist Approach (London: Routledge, 2014), 4–5. 3 Ibid., 106. 4 Munim Sirry, Scriptural Polemics: The Qurʾān and Other Religions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 34. 5 Ibid., 63. 6 Nöldeke’s Geschichte des Qorans was first published in 1860 (Göttingen: Ver- lag der Dieterichschen Buchhandlung). The work was expanded by his student Schwally in three parts in 1909, 1919 and 1938. According to Morteza Karimi- Nia, prior to Nöldeke, some Western scholars such as Gustav Weil (d. 1889), William Muir (d. 1905) and Aloys Sprenger (d. 1893) had contributed to histori- cal Qurʾānic scholarship. See Karimi-Nia, “The Historiography of the Qurʾān in the Muslim World: The Influence of Theodor Nöldeke”, Journal of Qurʾanic Studies 15, no. 1 (2013): 49. 7 We explain this idea in detail in Chapter 1. 8 Cited in Mehran Kamrava, Iran’s Intellectual Revolution (Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 2008), 91. 9 Vali Nasr, The Shia Revival (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007), 216. 10 Cited in Kamrava, Iran’s Intellectual Revolution, 93. 11 Ibid. 12 For example, see Abbas Amanat and Frank Griffel, eds., Shari‘a: Islamic Law in the Contemporary Context (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007); Khaled Abou El Fadl, Speaking in God’s Name: Islamic Law, Authority and Women (Oxford: Oneworld, 2001). 13 As Shadaab Rahemtulla noted, since “the law [Sharīʿa] has dominated discus- sions of Islam in general”, “less attention has been given to reformism based on the Qurʾān”. See Rahemtulla, Qurʾān of the Oppressed: Liberation Theology and Gender Justice in Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 1. In this study, Rahemtulla explored the hermeneutic approaches of four contemporary Muslim scholars – Farid Esack, Asghar Ali Engineer, Amina Wadud and Asma Barlas – and their ideas about social justice and liberation, arguing that they provide a model for reform based on the Qurʾān. 1 The term Orient itself is often claimed to be adopted from the Latin word oriens. The adjective Oriental similarly refers to the peoples and cultures of the area of what is today called the Middle East or, alternatively, the Near East. See Michael Curtis, Orientalism and Islam: European Thinkers on Oriental Despotism in the Middle East and India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 2. 2 Daniel Martin Varisco, Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2007), 31. 3 For some studies concerning this issue, see Philip Almond, “Western Percep- tions of Islam: 1700–1900”, Australian Journal of Politics and History 49, no. 3 (2003): 412–24; Curtis, Orientalism and Islam, 31–7. 4 John Renard, Islam and Christianity: Theological Themes in Comparative Per- spective (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011), XXI. 5 Curtis, Orientalism and Islam, 31–2. 6 These two approaches to the Qurʾān are explored in Part I of this book. In this context, some scholars such as Christoph Luxenberg have argued that the Qurʾān is based on a Christian liturgical document written in the Aramaic lan- guage. See Abdullah Saeed, The Qur’an: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2008), 108–9. 7 For a brief analysis of some of these approaches – in particular those of Schacht, Patricia Crone, Michael Cook and Wansbrough – see Andrew Rippin, “Literary Analysis of Koran, Tafsir and Sira: The Methodologies of John Wansbrough”, in Approaches to Islam in Religious Studies, ed. Richard Martin (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1985), 151–63. 8 John Wansbrough, Qurʾānic Studies: Sources and Methods of Scriptural Inter- pretation (New York, NY: Prometheus Books, 2004), 43–50. 9 Andrew Rippin, “The Qurʾān as Literature: Perils, Pitfalls and Prospects”, in The Qurʾān and Its Interpretive Tradition (Aldershot: Ashghate, 2001), 44. 10 Ibid., 45. 11 Morteza Karimi-Nia, “Contemporary Qurʾānic Studies in Iran”, Journal of Qurʾanic Studies 14, no. 1 (2012): 52. The most comprehensive work about Bazargan’s Qurʾānic studies is Behnam Sadeghi, “The Chronology of the Qurʾān: A Stylometric Research Program”, Arabica 58, no. 3 (2011): 210–99. It should be noted that some Western scholars of the twentieth century such as Theo- dor Nöldeke (d. 1930) and Richard Bell (d. 1952) arranged Qurʾānic suras chronologically. 12 Mahmud Ramyar, Tarīkh-e Qurʾān [The History of the Qurʾān], 6th ed. (Teh- ran: Amirkabir Publication, 2005), 130–1. For another example, see Ibid., 165. 13 Ibid., 130. 14 For example, see Ibid., 110–1. 15 Karimi-Nia, “Contemporary Qurʾānic Studies”, 52. 16 For a comprehensive list, see Ibid., 51–3. In some of these books, the history of ancient Arabia and the influence of Iranian culture and religions, such as Zoro- astrianism and Manichaeism, on Arabian culture were presented. It should be noted that scholars such as Khui and Taqizadeh were more interested more in the history of Arabia before and after the rise of Islam than Qurʾānic studies. 17 Hamid Algar, “Introduction”, in Jalal Al-e Ahmad, Occidentosis: A Plague from the West, trans. R. Campbell (Berkeley, CA: Mizan Press, 1984), 15. 18 Ibid. 19 Jalal Al-e Ahmad, Occidentosis: A Plague from the West, trans. R. Campbell (Berkeley, CA: Mizan Press, 1984), 99. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., 98. 22 Ibid., 99. 23 Ibid., 100. 24 This line of thinking was supported during later decades – and after the Iranian Revolution of 1979 – in Iran. One of the proponents of this idea is Reza Davari. Much like Al-e Ahmad, Davari has argued that Westerners researched the East in order to dominate it. For Davari, “the East for the West is only an object of domination”. Davari, Enqelab-e Eslamī va Vazʿ-e Konounī-e ʿĀlam [The Islamic Revolution and the World Status Quo] (Tehran: Vahed-e Motaleat va Tahqiqat- e Farhangi va Tarikhi, 1983), 18. Indeed, central to Davari’s project is the idea that orientalism is consistent with imperialism. Although Davari takes a negative approach to the discourse of orientalism, he has never launched a comprehensive study of the works of orientalists on Islam and the Qurʾān. 25 Karimi-Nia, “Contemporary Qurʾānic Studies”, 56. 26 Ibid., 51. 27 Ibid., 57. 28 In the next chapters, we examine this issue in detail. 29 Karimi-Nia, “Contemporary Qurʾānic Studies”, 61. 30 A brief overview of the speeches delivered at this conference is available at Huj- jat al-Islam Zamani, et al., “Jadīd-tain Ārāy-e Mostashreqān darbareh Qurʾān” [“Survey of the Latest Views of Orientalists About the Qurʾān”], accessed 10 October 2018, www.porsemanequran.com/node/578. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid. 36 A brief overview of the speeches delivered at this conference is available at “Neshast-e ʿElmī-e Qurʾān va Mostashreqān” [“The Scientific Conference of the Qurʾān and Orientalists”], accessed 10 October 2017, www.quransc.com/ 26-2014-01-21-19-23-08/2014-01-21-19-29-07/43-1.html?showall=&start=6. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid. 41 For example, see Seyyed Ali Akbar Rabiʿ Nataj, “Shubhe-Shenāsī-e Taḥrīf-e Qurʾān az Dīdgāh-e Khavarshenāsān” [“Recognition of the Doubt Cast by the Orientalists About Alteration of the Qurʾān”], Pajūhesh-hāye Eslamī 1, no. 1 (2007): 54. 42 See “Neshast-e ʿElmī-e Qurʾān va Mostashreqān”. 43 Ibid. 44 Majid Maʿaref, “An Introduction to Qurʾānic Studies of Orientalists with an Emphasis Upon Criticism of Regis Blachere’s Opinions Concerning Collection and Formulation of the Qurʾān”. (Paper written in connection with research approved by the faculty of theology of the University of Tehran, 2005), 38. 45 Mohsen Alviri, Moṭāleʿāt-e Eslamī dar Gharb [Islamic Studies in the West] (Teh- ran: Semat Publication, 2013), 188–200. 46 Muhammad al-Daʿmi, “Orientalism and Arab-Islamic History: An Inquiry into the Orientalists’ Motives and Compulsions”, Arab Studies Quarterly 20, no. 4 (1998): 1–2. 47 Ibid., 2. 48 S. Parvez Manzoor, “Method Against Truth: Orientalism and Qurʾānic Studies”, in The Qurʾān: Style and Contents, ed. Andrew Rippin (Surrey: Ashghate Pub- lishing Company, 2001), 381. 49 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1979), 6. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid., 3. 52 Ibid. 53 Curtis, Orientalism and Islam, 17. 54 Ibid. According to Curtis, “Writing by scholarly Orientalists and observation by pilgrims, merchants, and travelers arose independently of any Western impe- rial or colonial interests in the Orient and from a variety of motives: natural curiosity about foreign areas; pursuit of objective new knowledge; empathy; and the desire to make comparisons with political, economic, or religious traits in the writer’s own country or in the West generally”. Ibid., 16. Other scholars have been critical of Said’s neglect of the phenomenon of orientalism in reverse and his ahistorical presentation of the continuation of orientalism from ancient times to the present. For details, see Dietrich Jung, Orientalists, Islamists and the Global Public Sphere: A Genealogy of the Modern Essentialist Image of Islam (Sheffield: Equinox Publishing Ltd, 2011), 23–37. In Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World, Said explained, “I have not been able to discover any period in European or American history since the Middle Ages in which Islam was generally discussed or thought about outside a framework created by passion, prejudice and political interests” ([New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1981], 23). This idea is criticised, since some scholars believe that “any scholarly work on Islam . . . reflect[s] the cultural understandings, subjectivities and prejudices of the scholar” – whether Muslim or non-Muslim. Saeed, The Qurʾān, 107. 55 Ignaz Goldziher, Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law, trans. Andras and Ruth Hamori (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 11. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid., 10. 59 William Montgomery Watt, Islam and Christianity Today: A Contribution to Dialogue (London: Routledge, 1983), 66. 60 Ibid., 66. 61 Reuven Firestone, Journeys in Holy Lands: The Evolution of the Abraham- Ishmael Legends in Islamic Exegesis (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990), 9. 62 Alford T. Welch, “Introduction: Qurʾānic Studies – Problems and Prospects”, Journal of the American Academy of Religion: Thematic Issue 47, no. 4 (1979): 626. 63 Angelika Neuwirth, “Negotiating Justice: A Pre-Canonical Reading of the Qurʾānic Creation Accounts (Part 1)”, Journal of Qurʾanic Studies 1, no. 1 (2000): 26. 64 Abraham Geiger, Judaism and Islam, trans. F. M. Young (New York, NY: Ktav, 1970). This book was first printed in 1898. 65 Günter Lüling, A Challenge to Islam for Reformation (Delhi: Motilal Banarsi- dass, 2003); Christoph Luxenberg, The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran: A Contribution to the Decoding of the Language of the Koran (New York, NY: Prometheus, 2009). 66 Indeed, Isrāʾīliyyāt is the body of narratives appeared in Islamic literature which originated from Jewish and Christian traditions. 67 Andrew G. Bannister, An Oral-Formulaic Study of the Qurʾan (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014), 19–20. 68 Muhammad Molavi, “Barresī-e Dīdgāh-hāye Khavarshenāsān darbāreh-e waḥyānī būdan-e Qurʾān” [“Exploring the Views of Orientalists About the Rev- elatory Nature of the Qurʾān”], Faṣl-nāmeh Qurʾān Kusar, no. 31 (2009): 64–5. 69 Ibid., 65–6. 70 Ali Nasiri and Muhammad Hossein Modaber, “Barresī-e Eqtebās-e Qurʾān az Tawrāt” [“The Examination of the Views of the Orientalists About the Jewish Sources of the Qurʾān”], Journal of the Qurʾānic Studies of Orientalists, no. 10 (2011): 128–30. 71 Ibid. 72 Ibid. 73 Ibid. 74 Seyyed Ali Akbar Rabi Nataj, Ramazan Mahdavi Azad Bani, and Habib Allah Halimi Jolodar, “Barresī-e Dīdgāh-e Khavarshenāsān Pirāmūn-e maṣāder-e Qurʾān” [“The Examination of the Views of Orientalists About the Sources of the Qurʾān”], Journal of the Qurʾānic Studies of Orientalists (2014), available at www.quranstudies.ir/content. 75 Abdul Hadi Feghhizadeh and Nasser Shamsbakhsh, “Critical Analysis on the Bases of Orientalists in the Belief of Qurʾānic Adoption from the Old and New Testaments”, International Research Journal of Applied and Basic Sciences 4, no. 3 (2013): 671 (with minor changes from the authors of this article). 76 Seyed Hossein Hosseini Karnami, “Review of the Orientalists’ Views About the Miracles of the Qurʾān”, Social Sciences and Technology Management 3, no. 3 (2015): 615–6. 77 Majid Maʿaref, “Darāmadī bar Qurʾān Pajūhī-e Mostashreqān va Asīb-shenāsī-e ān” [“Orientalists’ Qurʾānic Scholarship and Its Weaknesses”], Pajūhesh-e Dīnī, no. 9 (2005), http://abp-zikra.com/fa/Articles/Show.aspx?ID=358. 78 Muhammad Mustafa al-Azami, The History of the Qurʾānic Text: From Revela- tion to Compilation (Leicester: UK Islamic Academy, 2003), 318. 79 Shabbir Akhtar, The Quran and the Secular Mind: A Philosophy of Islam (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), 28. 80 Muzaffar Iqbal, “Western Academia and the Qurʾān: Some Enduring Preju- dices”, Muslim World Book Review 30, no. 1 (2009): 12. 81 Ibid., 10. 82 Karimi-Nia, “Historiography of the Qurʾān”, 47. 83 Alexandra Bevilacqua, The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018), 4. 84 Karimi-Nia, “Historiography of the Qurʾān”, 47. 85 Ibid., 48–9. 86 Richard Bell, The Qur’an Translated, with a Critical Rearrangement of the Surahs (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1937–1939). 87 Andrew Rippin, “Review: Reading the Qurʾān With Richard Bell”, Journal of the American Oriental Society 112, no. 4 (1992): 641. 88 Muhammad Javad Eskandarloo, “Tarīkh-gozārī-e Āyāt-e Qurʾān az Negāh-e Richard Bell” [“Dating of the Qurʾānic Verses from Richard Bell’s View”], accessed 25 October 2017, www.quransc.com/26-2014-01-21-19-23-08/2014- 01-21-19-29-07/43-1.html?showall=&start=2. 89 Molavi, “Barresī-e Dīdgāh-hāye Khavarshenāsān darbāreh-e waḥyānī būdan-e Qurʾān”, 66–7. For similar ideas, see Reza Haq-Panah and Mostafa Ahmadi- far, “Barresī-e rooykard-hāye Khavarshenāsān Pirāmūn-e Makkī va Madanī” [“Exploring the Views of Orientalists Concerning Meccan and Medinan”], Journal of Qurʾānic Studies of Orientalists, no. 12 (2012): 86–7. 90 Some of Abu Zayd’s ideas explained in the following paragraph have been selected from these two books. 91 Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd and Esther R. Nelson, The Voice of an Exile: Reflections on Islam (London: Praeger Publications, 2004), 103. 92 Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, Naqd al-Khiṭāb al-Dīnī [The Critique of Religious Dis- course] (Cairo: Dar al-Thaqafah al-Jadidah, 1992), 63. 93 Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, “Divine Attributes in the Qur’an: Some Poetic Aspects”, in Islam and Modernity: Muslim Intellectuals Respond, ed. John Cooper, Ronald L. Nettler, and Mohamed Mahmoud (London: I. B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2000), 197. 94 Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, Mafhūm al-Naṣṣ: Dirāsa fī ʿulūm al-Qurʾān [The Con- cept of the Text: Studies on the Qurʾānic Sciences] (Beirut: al-Markaz al-Thaqafi al-ʿArabi, 1998), 24. 95 Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, Rethinking the Qurʾān: Towards a Humanistic Herme- neutics (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), 37. 96 It should be noted that some Iranian contextualist scholars such as Soroush and Kadivar have admired Abu Zayd’s ideas and incorporated those ideas into their own reformist projects. As will be discussed in the next chapters, aspects of Abu Zayd’s ideas have also been highlighted by some Iranian contextualist scholars. 97 Hasan Naqi-Zadeh, “Andīsheh-hāye Abu Zayd and Bardāsht-e oo az Qurʾān” [“Abu Zayd’s Thoughts and His Ideas About the Qurʾān”], Moṭāleʿāt-e Eslamī 68 (2005): 155. 98 Ibid. 99 Ibid., 153–4. 100 Ahmad Saʿadi and Sediqeh Nik-Tabʿ Etaʿati, “Arzyābī-e Didgāh-e Abu Zayd darbāreh Tarīkh-mandī-e Qurʾān ba Taʾkīd bar Goftarī Būdan-e Waḥy” [“Exploring Abu Zayd’s Ideas About Historicity of the Qurʾān With an Empha- sis on the Oral Nature of Revelation”], Andīsheh Novīn-e Dīnī 51 (2018): 82. 101 Ibid. 102 Ibid., 83. 103 Ibid. 104 Saeed, The Qurʾān, 113. 105 Ibid., 112. 106 Richard C. Martin, “Inimitability”, in Encyclopedia of the Qurʾān, ed. Jane Dammen McAuliffe, vol. 2 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2002), 526–36. 107 Muhammad Javad Eskandarloo and Seyyed Reza Moadeb, “iʿjāz-e Qurʾān” [“Inimitability of the Qurʾān”], accessed 25 October 2017, http://quran-journal. com/orientalist/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=90&lang =fa. 108 Ibid. 109 Martin, “Inimitability”, 532. 110 Ibid. 111 Ibid., 530. 112 Ibid., 533. 113 Eskandarloo and Moadeb, “iʿjāz-e Qurʾān”. 114 Ibid. 115 Ibid. 116 Ibid. 117 Ruth Roded, “Women and the Qurʾān”, in Encyclopedia of the Qurʾān, ed. Jane Dammen McAuliffe, vol. 5 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2005), 532–41. 118 Maryam Nushin, “Barresī va Naqd-e Maqāleh-e Zanān va Qurʾān” [“Explo- ration and Criticism of the Article ‘Women and the Qurʾān’ ”], Journal of Qurʾānic Studies of Orientalists, no. 5 (2008): 96–120. 119 Roded, “Women and the Qurʾān”, 524. 120 Nushin, “Barresī va Naqd-e Maqāleh-e Zanān va Qurʾān”, 105. 121 Ibid., 106. 122 Roded, “Women and the Qurʾān”, 524. 123 Nushin, “Barresī va Naqd-e Maqāleh-e Zanān va Qurʾān”, 106–7. 124 Ibid., 108–9. 125 Roded, “Women and the Qurʾān”, 529. 126 Ibid. 127 Ibid. 128 Ibid. 129 Nushin, “Barresī va Naqd-e Maqāleh-e Zanān va Qurʾān”, 109–10. 130 Roded, “Women and the Qurʾān”, 534–5. 131 Nushin, “Barresī va Naqd-e Maqāleh-e Zanān va Qurʾān”, 114–5. 132 Roded, “Women and the Qurʾān”, 532. 133 Nushin, “Barresī va Naqd-e Maqāleh-e Zanān va Qurʾān”, 113–4. 134 Uri Rubin, “Prophets and Prophethood”, in Encyclopedia of the Qurʾān, ed. Jane Dammen McAuliffe, vol. 4 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2004), 289–307. 135 Hasan Rezayee and Hossein Alavi-Mehr, “Barresī-e Maqāleh Anbīyāʾ va Nabovat” [“Examining the Article ‘Prophets and Prophethood’ ”], Journal of Qurʾānic Studies of Orientalists, no. 5 (2008): 65–81. 136 Rubin, “Prophets and Prophethood”, 289. 137 Ibid., 295. 138 Rezayee and Alavi-Mehr, “Barresī-e Maqāleh Anbīyāʾ va Nabovat”, 70–3. 139 Rubin, “Prophets and Prophethood”, 302. 140 Rezayee and Alavi-Mehr, “Barresī-e Maqāleh Anbīyāʾ va Nabovat”, 74–5. 141 Rubin, “Prophets and Prophethood”, 291. 142 Ibid., 297. 143 Rezayee and Alavi-Mehr, “Barresī-e Maqāleh Anbīyāʾ va Nabovat”, 76–8. 144 Rubin, “Prophets and Prophethood”, 299. 145 Ibid. 146 Rezayee and Alavi-Mehr, “Barresī-e Maqāleh Anbīyāʾ va Nabovat”, 79–80. 147 Wael Hallaq, “Apostasy”, in Encyclopedia of the Qurʾān, ed. Jane Dammen McAuliffe, vol. 1 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2001), 119–22. 148 Hasan Rezayee Haftadar and Muhammad Mahdi Aziz-Allahi, “Barresī-e Maqāleh Ertedād dar Dāyerat al-Maʿaref Leiden” [“Examining the Article ‘Apostasy’ in the ‘Encyclopedia of the Qurʾān’ ”], Journal of Qurʾānic Studies of Orientalists, no. 12 (2012): 113–30. 149 Hallaq, “Apostasy”, 122. 150 Rezayee Haftadar and Aziz-Allahi, “Barresī-e Maqāleh Ertedād dar Dāyerat al-Maʿaref Leiden”, 126–7. 151 Hallaq, “Apostasy”, 122. 152 Rezayee Haftadar and Aziz-Allahi, “Barresī-e Maqāleh Ertedād dar Dāyerat al-Maʿaref Leiden”, 126–7. 153 Hallaq, “Apostasy”, 120. 154 Rezayee Haftadar and Aziz-Allahi, “Barresī-e Maqāleh Ertedād dar Dāyerat al-Maʿaref Leiden”, 123. 155 Ibid., 118–20. 1 The proponents of the discourse of contextualisation in Iran have sometimes been referred to as religious intellectuals (rowshanfekrān-e dini). 2 Following Omid Safi, we use the word progressive to refer to a number of val- ues such as rationalism, anti-authoritarianism, democracy, pluralism and gender equality. See Safi, “Introduction: The Times They Are Changing – A Muslim Quest for Justice, Gender Equality and Pluralism”, in Progressive Muslims on Justice, Gender and Pluralism, ed. Omid Safi (Oxford: Oneworld Publication, 2003), 3. 3 According to Asef Bayat, the term rowshanfekrān-e dini first appeared in a speech delivered by Muhammad Khatami, long before he became the president of Iran. The term refers to a group of intellectuals who are neither “religious fanatics” nor “secular intellectuals”, although religious intellectuals are not a uniform group. See Bayat, “The Making of Post-Islamist Iran”, in Post-Islamism: The Changing Faces of Political Islam (Oxford: Oxford University of Press, 2013), 49. 4 We use the word literalism in the course of this paper to refer to the idea that the literal meaning of the text is privileged over all other meanings in the process of interpretation. When it comes to the sociolegal passages of the Qurʾān, a literal- ist interpretation assumes that words can be understood separately from their context and that sociolegal statements should be applied independently of their context in all times and places. For an explanation of how conservatives support a literal reading of the Qurʾān, see Kamrava, Iran’s Intellectual Revolution, 93. 5 Ramin Jahanbegloo argued that “the current role of intellectuals in Iran is quite different from what it was before revolution. The reevaluation of political ide- als [has] been part of a learning process that has generated a collective sense of responsibility among younger intellectuals”. Jahanbegloo, “The Role of the Intellectuals”, Journal of Democracy 11, no. 4 (2000): 137. 6 Nikki Keddie, Modern Iran: Roots and Results of Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 305. 7 See Farhad Khosrokhavar, “The New Intellectuals in Iran”, Social Compass 51, no. 2 (2004): 193. 8 Forough Jahanbakhsh, “Introduction: Abdolkarim Soroush’s Neo-Rationalist Approach to Islam”, in Abdolkarim Soroush, The Expansion of Prophetic Expe- rience: Essays on Historicity, Contingency and Plurality in Religion, trans. Nilou Mobasser (Leiden: Brill, 2009), XV. 9 Banafsheh Madaninejad, “New Theology in the Islamic Republic of Iran: A Comparative Study Between Abdolkarim Soroush and Mohsen Kadivar” (PhD dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, 2011), VI. 10 For a comprehensive discussion see Yadullah Shahibzadeh, Islamism and Post- Islamism in Iran: An Intellectual History (Oslo: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 101–3. 11 For a brief analysis of Kiyan, see Forough Jahanbakhsh, Islam, Democracy and Religious Modernism in Iran (1953–2000): From Bazargan to Soroush (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 142–3. According to Ulrich von Schwerin, Kiyan’s edition “reached a readership of up to 50000 and for almost a decade remained the most influ- ential publication in intellectual circles as well as the principal forum of the discourse on reform”. Schwerin, The Dissident Mullah: Ayatollah Montazeri and the Struggle for Reform in Revolutionary Iran (London: I. B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2015), 135. 12 It must be noted that from the very outset the participants in the reform dis- course in Iran were not a monolithic or homogenous group. Thus, their religious discourses and approaches to the interpretation of the Qurʾān differ from one another. 13 Mehran Kamrava, “Iranian Shiism Under Debate”, Middle East Policy 10, no. 2 (2003): 102–12; Jahanbakhsh, Islam, Democracy, 142–3; Asef Bayat, Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post-Islamist Turn (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 113–8. 14 For a good review of this view, see Karimi-Nia, “The Historiography of the Qurʾān”, 48–9. 15 As Farid Esack noted, “In the case of events occasioning revelation . . . tradi- tional Qurʾānic studies reduced the ‘event-ness’ of the text to storytelling” and “in the case of abrogation, its significance was confined to the legal sphere”. Farid Esack, Qur’an, Liberation & Pluralism: An Islamic Perspective of Inter- religious Solidarity Against Oppression (Oxford: OneWorld Publication, 1997), 55. 16 Saeed, Reading the Qurʾān, 15. 17 Khaled Abou El Fadl, Reasoning With God: Reclaiming Shariʿa in the Modern Age (New York, NY: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014), 373. 18 As argued in the first part, Abu Zayd argued that the Qurʾān, once revealed to the Prophet, entered history and became subject to sociohistorical regulations or the laws surrounding it. Abu Zayd used this idea to contextualise the sociole- gal statements of the Qurʾān, emphasising their mutability, especially in today’s context. Rahman, another contextualist scholar, argued that if the Qurʾān is to be relevant to contemporary conditions, a double movement is required: “First, one must move from the concrete case treatments of the Qurʾān – taking the nec- essary and relevant social conditions of that time into account – to the general principles upon which the entire teaching converges. Second, from this general level there must be a movement back to specific legislation, taking into account the necessary and relevant social conditions now obtaining”. Rahman, Islam & Modernity: Transformation of an Intellectual Tradition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 20. 19 Saeed, “Some Reflections”, 224. 20 Esack, Qur’an, Liberation & Pluralism, 75. 21 Cited in Massimo Campanini, The Qur’an: Modern Muslim Interpretations, trans. Caroline Higgitt (London: Routledge, 2011), 76. 22 Adis Duderija, The Imperatives of Progressive Islam (London: Routledge, 2017), 19. 23 It is, for example, in this sense that Shahrur stated, “Just as in the seventh- century people understood Allah’s Book with the help of what was then con- temporary knowledge, in the twenty-first century we must understand it with what is now contemporary knowledge. Only through such a truly contemporary rereading of Allah’s Book can we succeed in achieving real reform and a suc- cessful renewal of Islamic thought”. Shahrur, The Qurʾan, Morality and Critical Reason: The Essential Muhammad Shahrur, trans. Andreas Christmann (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 2. Shahrur indeed argued that the text is capable of being under- stood in a contemporary manner. As such, “legal rulings do change as a result of epistemological and scientific developments that take place in our societies”. Ibid., 496. 1 Jahanbakhsh, Islam, Democracy and Religious Modernism in Iran, 144–6. 2 Schwerin, The Dissident Mullah, 142. 3 Sasan Tavassoli, Christian Encounters With Iran: Engaging Muslim Thinkers After the Revolution (London; New York: I. B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2011), 136. 4 Tavassoli explains why Soroush lived in exile: “After years of facing . . . death threats, censorship and restrictions on public speaking and traveling, Soroush was eventually banned from his university teaching post” (Ibid.) It should be added that Soroush has been highly critical of the Islamic Republic in the past decade or so. 5 Abdolkarim Soroush, The Expansion of Prophetic Experience: Essays on His- toricity, Contingency and Plurality in Religion, trans. Nilou Mobasser (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 16. 6 Ibid., 338. 7 Ibid., 11–2. 8 Ibid., 197. 9 Ibid., 325. 10 Abdolkarim Soroush, “Muhammad: The Narrator of Prophetic Visions [Dreams]”, accessed 20 February 2017, http://drsoroush.com/fa/ 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 See for example Q 39:68–74, 78:18–20. 14 Soroush, “Muhammad”. 15 Ibid. 16 In this context, Soroush went on to state that “the Word of God has no par- ticular form”. Abdolkarim Soroush, “Masih dar Eslām” [“Jesus in Islam”], accessed 15 December 2016, www.drsoroush.com/Persian/By_DrSoroush/ P-NWS-13880901-MasihDarIslam.html. 17 Soroush, Expansion of Prophetic Experience, 12. 18 Ibid., 199. 19 Ibid., 10. 20 Ibid., 10. Ibn Khaldun stated “revelation causes pain, since it means that an essence leaves its own essence and exchanges its own stage for the ultimate stage . . . gradual habituation to the process of revelation brings some relief”. Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, trans. Franz Rosenthal, abridged and edited by N. J. Dawood (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), 78. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., 11. 23 Soroush, “Muhammad”. 24 Soroush, Expansion of Prophetic Experience, 11. 25 Ibid., 5–6. 26 Ibid., 9. 27 Ibid., 13. 28 Ibid., 18. 29 Ibid., 328. 30 Ibid., 17. 31 Ibid., 328. 32 Ibid., 16–7. 33 Ibid., 18. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid., 16. 36 Ibid., 17. 37 Ibid., 16. 38 Ibid., 22. 39 Ibid., 23. 40 Ibid., 275. 41 Ibid., 67. 42 Ibid., 275. 43 Ibid., 63. 44 Katajun Amirpur, “The Expansion of Prophetic Experience: Abdolkarim Sorūš’s New Approach to Qurʾānic Revelation”, Die Welt des Islams 51, nos. 3–4 (2011): 434. 45 Ibid., 436. 46 Ibid., 432. 47 Soroush, Expansion of Prophetic Experience, 88–9. 48 Shahibzadeh, Islamism and Post-Islamism in Iran, 136. 49 Abdolkarim Soroush, Qabz va Basṭ-e Teʿorīk-e Sharīʿat [The Theoretical Con- traction and Expansion of the Sharīʿat] (Tehran: Sirat Publication, 1995), 112. 50 Ibid., 248–9. 51 Ibid., 106–7. 52 Ibid., 187. 53 Abdolkarim Soroush, Reason, Freedom and Democracy in Islam: Essential Writings of Abdolkarim Soroush, ed. and trans. Mahmoud Sadri and Ahmad Sadri (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 37. 54 Soroush, Qabz va Basṭ-e Teʿorīk-e Sharīʿat, 165. 55 Ibid., 485–6. 56 Ibid., 167. 57 Ibid., 138. 58 Ibid., 270. 59 Ibid., 264–5. 60 Ibid., 260–2. 61 Abdolkarim Soroush, “The Evolution and Devolution of Religious Knowledge”, in Liberal Islam: A Sourcebook, ed. Charles Kurzman (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1998), 249. 62 Soroush, Qabz va Basṭ-e Teʿorīk-e Sharīʿat, 357. 63 Ibid., 359. 64 Soroush, “Evolution and Devolution”, 251. 65 Soroush, Reason, Freedom, 86. 66 Soroush, Qabz va Basṭ-e Teʿorīk-e Sharīʿat, 244. According to Bayat, this theory has also been adopted by other religious intellectuals in Iran. For example, Aya- tollah Abdullah Nouri stated that “relativity of truth is one thing, and episte- mological error is something else”. As far as Islam is concerned, “except God, there is nothing absolute”. Indeed, “the idea of religion is complete, truthful and sacred, but our perception of it is not. The idea of religion is not subject to change, but our perception of it is”. Bayat, “The Making of Post-Islamist Iran”, 51. 67 Faqīh is an expert in Islamic jurisprudence. 68 Soroush, Qabz va Basṭ-e Teʿorīk-e Sharīʿat, 442. 69 Ibid., 487. 70 Ibid., 244. 71 Soroush, Expansion of Prophetic Experience, 297. 72 See Q 21:30, 41:9–11, 2:29, 7:54, 11:7, 36:38, 36:40, 72:8 and 16:15. 73 For the details of this idea, see Ali Akbar, “Islam-Science Relation from the Per- spective of Post-Revolutionary Iranian Religious Intellectuals”, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 46, no.1 (2019): 104–22. 74 William Montgomery Watt, Islamic Revelation in the Modern World (Edin- burgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1969), 15, 108. 75 Watt, Islam and Christianity Today, 59. 76 Ibid., 66. 77 Ibid. Similar to our observations, Oddbjørn Leirvik stated, “In the writings of orientalist scholars, the Islamic idea of revelation is normally dealt with as part of a larger discussion of Muhammad’s personality and the development of his prophetic career”. Oddbjørn Leirvik, “Waḥy and Tanzīl: Modern Islamic Approaches to Divine Inspiration, Progressive Revelation and Human Text”, Studia Theologica 69, no. 2 (2015): 107. 78 William Montgomery Watt and Richard Bell, Introduction to the Qurʾān (Edin- burgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1970), 22. 79 Watt, Islam and Christianity Today, 68. 80 Ibid., 68–9; Watt, Islamic Revelation, 46. 81 Watt, Islam and Christianity Today, 66. 82 Soroush, Expansion of Prophetic Experience, 19. 83 Watt, Islamic Revelation, 20. 84 Ibid., 108. 1 For a brief biography of Shabestari, see Farzin Vahdat, “Post-Revolutionary Islamic Modernity in Iran”, in Modern Muslim Intellectuals and the Qurʾān, ed. Suha Taji-Farouki (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 198–9; Tavassoli, Chris- tian Encounters with Iran, 148–9. A brief biography of Shabestari is also avail- able on his website at http://mohammadmojtahedshabestari.com/%d8%b2% d9%86%d8%af%da%af%db%8c%e2%80%8c%d9%86%d8%a7%d9%8 5%d9%87/ www.MuhammadMojtahedshabestari.com/ biography.php. 2 See Schwerin, The Dissident Mullah, 143. 3 Muhammad Mojtahed Shabestari, Hermenutīk, Kitāb va Sonnat [Hermeneutics, the Book and the Tradition] (Tehran: Tarh-e No, 2000), 182. 4 Muhammad Mojtahed Shabestari, “Kār-e Tafsīr-e Qurʾān Pāyān-nāpazīr ast” [“The Task of Interpretation of the Qurʾān Is Endless”], accessed 20 Decem- ber 2017, www.islahweb.org/node/3100. 5 Shabestari, Hermenutīk, Kitāb va Sonnat, 36–7. 6 Ibid., 182. 7 Ibid., 175. 8 Ibid., 177. 9 Muhammad Mojtahed Shabestari, “Gherāʾat-e Nabavī az Jahān” [“Prophetic Interpretation of the World”], 2008, http://mohammadmojtahedshabestari.com /. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Cited in Ashk Dahlen, Islamic Law, Epistemology and Modernity: Legal Phi- losophy in Contemporary Iran (New York, NY: Routledge, 2003), 172. 14 Muhammad Mojtahed Shabestari, “Cherā bāyad Andīsheh-e Dīnī ra Naqd Kard?” [“Why Should the Religious Thought Be Subject to Criticism?”], Kiyan, no. 18 (1994): 18. 15 Muhammad Mojtahed Shabestari, “Rāh-e Doshvār-e Mardom-sālāri” [“The Difficult Path to Democracy”], Aftab Journal, no. 22 (2003), http://ensani.ir/fa/ content/92242/default.aspx. 16 Muhammad Mojtahed Shabestari, “Hermenutīk-e Falsafī va Taʿadod-e Gherāʾat-hā az Dīn” [“The Philosophical Hermeneutic and Multiple Interpre- tations of Religion”], Bāztab-e Andīsheh, no. 21 (2001), www.ensani.ir/fa/ content/91334/default.aspx. 17 Muhammad Mojtahed Shabestari, “Gherāʾat-e Nabavī az Jahān (14)”, 2013, http://mohammadmojtahedshabestari.com/. 18 Muhammad Mojtahed Shabestari, Naqdī bar Qerāʾat-e Rasmī az Dīn: Boḥran-hā, Chālesh-hā va Rāh-e ḥal-hā [A Critique of the Official Reading of Religion: Crises, Challenges and Solutions] (Tehran: Tarh-e No, 2005), 267. 19 Shabestari, “Gherāʾat-e Nabavī az Jahān”. 20 Muhammad Mojtahed Shabestari, “Gherāʾat-e Nabavī az Jahān (15): What Is the Qurʾān?” 2013, http://mohammadmojtahedshabestari.com/. 21 Shabestari, “Rāh-e Doshvār-e Mardom-sālāri”. 22 Shabestari, Naqdī bar Qerāʾat-e Rasmī az Dīn, 271. 23 Ibid., 267–8. 24 Shabestari, Hermenutīk, Kitāb va Sonnat, 183. 25 Shabestari, “Cherā bāyad Andīsheh-e Dīnī ra Naqd Kard?” 16. 26 Ibid., 21. 27 Ibid. 28 Shabestari, Hermenutīk, Kitāb va Sonnat, 189. 29 Cited in Meysam Badamchi, Post-Islamist Political Theory: Iranian Intellectuals and Political Liberalism in Dialogue (Istanbul: Springer, 2017), 75. 30 Cited in Dahlen, Islamic Law, 173. 31 Cited in Tavassoli, Christian Encounters With Iran, 150. 32 Shabestari, “Cherā bāyad Andīsheh-e Dīnī ra Naqd Kard?” 18. 33 Ibid., 19. In the same article, Shabestrai argued that even the external criticism of religion (naqd-e birūnī-e dīn) is beneficial to religion. He referred to the mod- ern critiques of religion in the West, which contributed to the development of modern Christian theology. These criticisms enable believers to rediscover the content of their faith. Ibid., 20. 34 Shabestari, “Kār-e Tafsīr-e Qurʾān Pāyān-nāpazīr ast”. 35 Shabestari, Hermenutīk, Kitāb va Sonnat, 260. 36 Ibid., 302. 37 Ibid., 286. 38 Shabestari, Naqdī bar Qerāʾat-e Rasmī az Dīn, 78. 39 Shabestari, Hermenutīk, Kitāb va Sonnat, 7–8. 40 Ibid., 161. 41 Ibid., 21–2. 42 Ibid., 37. 43 Ibid., 34. 44 Ibid., 39. 45 Shabestari, “Gherāʾat-e Nabavī az Jahān”. 46 Shabestari, Hermenutīk, Kitāb va Sonnat, 254–5. For the details of this idea, see Akbar, “Islam-Science Relation”, 115–20. 47 Tavassoli, Christian Encounters With Iran, 149. 48 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. 1, part 2 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1956– 1975), 750. 49 Shabestari, Naqdī bar Qerāʾat-e Rasmī az Dīn, 324–5. See also Muhammad Mojtahed Shabestari, Imān va Āzādī [Faith and Freedom] (Tehran: Tarhe No, 1997), 27–8. 50 Ibid., 120. 51 Mary Ann Stenger, “Faith and Religion”, in Cambridge Companion to Paul Til- lich, ed. Russell Re Manning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 93. 52 Ibid., 99. 53 Shabestari, Imān va Āzādī, 59. 54 Ibid., 58–9. 55 Shabestari, Naqdī bar Qerāʾat-e Rasmī az Dīn, 404; Shabestari, Imān va Āzādī, 27. 56 Shabestari, Hermenutīk, Kitāb va Sonnat, 17. 57 Gayle L. Ormiston and Alan D. Schrift, The Hermeneutic Tradition: From Ast to Ricoeur (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990), 19. 58 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London; New York: Continuum Books, 1975), 251. 1 Hasan Yousefi-Eshkevari, “Autobiography”, in Islam and Democracy in Iran: Eshkevari and the Quest for Reform, ed. Ziba Mir-Hosseini and Richard Tapper (London: I. B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2006), 43. 2 Ibid., 45. 3 Ibid., 47. 4 Ibid., 50. 5 Hasan Yousefi-Eshkevari, Shariʿati va Naqd-e Sonnat [Shariʿati and the Critique of Tradition] (Tehran: Yadavaran, 2000), 129–30. 6 Ziba Mir-Hosseini and Richard Tapper, Islam and Democracy in Iran: Eshk- evari and the Quest for Reform (London: I. B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2006), 61. 7 Hasan Yousefi-Eshkevari, “Faithful Life in an Urfi State”, trans. Mojtaba Mah- davi and Siavash Saffari, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 31, no. 1 (2011): 26. 8 Hasan Yousefi-Eshkevari, “Ḥuqūq-e Bashar va Aḥkām-e Ejtemāeī-e Islam” [“Human Rights and the Social Precepts of Islam”], accessed 28 January 2018, http://yousefieshkevari.com/?p=751. 9 Hasan Yousefi-Eshkevari, “Reformist Islam and Modern Society”, in Islam and Democracy in Iran: Eshkevari and the Quest for Reform, ed. Ziba Mir-Hosseini and Richard Tapper (London: I. B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2006), 160. 10 Hasan Yousefi-Eshkevari, Taʾamulāt-e tanhāeī: Dibācheheī bar Hermenutīk [Some Thoughts in Loneliness: Studies on Hermeneutics] (Tehran: Sharabi Pub- lication, 2003), 72. 11 Hasan Yousefi-Eshkevari, “Tamāmī-e Aḥkām-e Ejtemāeī-e Islam mānand-e Diyāt va qavānīn-e Keyfarī va Ḥuqūq-e Zan Taghīr-pazīrand” [“All Social Precepts of Islam Such as the Laws of Punishment and Women’s Rights Are Changeable”], 2011, http://yousefieshkevari.com/?p=3685. 12 Ibid. We already pointed out that the discipline of asbāb al-nuzūl as traditionally understood was primarily used to develop law. Indeed, it was not primarily used to develop significant discussions to relate God’s Word to its context. As Saeed noted, “contextually contingent texts of the Qurʾān were divorced from their context and applied decontextually”. Saeed, Reading the Qurʾān, 15. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. See also Akbar and Saeed, “Interpretation and Mutability, 449–51. 15 Hasan Yousefi-Eshkevari, “Fiqh, Ekhtelāfāt-e Fiqhī va Taghīr-pazīrī-e Aḥkām” [“Jurisprudence, Differences on Jurisprudence and Changeability of Precepts”], 2010, http://yousefieshkevari.com/?p=1322. 16 Hasan Yousefi-Eshkevari, “Women’s Rights and the Women’s Movement”, in Islam and Democracy in Iran: Eshkevari and the Quest for Reform, ed. Ziba Mir-Hosseini and Richard Tapper (London: I. B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2006), 164. 17 Eshkevari, “Ḥuqūq-e Bashar va Aḥkām-e Ejtemāeī-e Islam”. 18 Hasan Yousefi-Eshkevari, “Islamic Democratic Government”, in Islam and Democracy in Iran: Eshkevari and the Quest for Reform, ed. Ziba Mir-Hosseini and Richard Tapper (London: I. B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2006), 80. 19 Ibid., 81. 20 Eshkevari, “Ḥuqūq-e Bashar va Aḥkām-e Ejtemāeī-e Islam”. 21 Eshkevari, “Islamic Democratic Government”, 80. 22 Eshkevari, “Fiqh, Ekhtelāfāt-e Fiqhī va Taghīr-pazīrī-e Aḥkām”. 23 Eshkevari, “Women’s Rights”, 165. 24 Eshkevari, “Fiqh, Ekhtelāfāt-e Fiqhī va Taghīr-pazīrī-e Aḥkām”. 25 Ibid. 26 Hasan Yousefi-Eshkevari, “Ḥuqūq va Manzelat-e Zan dar Islam-e No-andīshāneh” [“The Rights and Positions of Women in New Islamic Think- ing”], 2010, http://yousefieshkevari.com/?p=1678. 27 Cited in Charles Kurzman, “Critics Within: Islamic Scholars’ Protests Against the Islamic State in Iran”, in An Islamic Reformation, ed. Michaelle Browers and Charles Kurzman (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004), 91. 28 Eshkevari, “Ḥuqūq va Manzelat-e Zan dar Islam-e No-andīshāneh”. 29 For further examination of this issue in Eshkevari’s writings, see Naser Gho- badzadeh, Religious Secularity: A Theological Challenge to the Islamic State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 106. 30 Eshkevari, “Women’s Rights”, 165. 31 Ibid. 32 Eshkevari, “Faithful Life”, 24. 33 Eshkevari, “Women’s Rights”, 167. 34 Eshkevari, “Ḥuqūq-e Bashar va Aḥkām-e Ejtemāeī-e Islam”. 35 Eshkevari, “Fiqh, Ekhtelāfāt-e Fiqhī va Taghīr-pazīrī-e Aḥkām”. 36 Eshkevari, “Reformist Islam and Modern Society”, 159. 37 Eshkevari, “Women’s Rights”, 167–8. 38 Eshkevari, “Ḥuqūq-e Bashar va Aḥkām-e Ejtemāeī-e Islam”. 39 Eshkevari, “Tamāmī-e Aḥkām-e Ejtemāeī-e Islam”. 40 Ibid. 41 Eshkevari, “Ḥuqūq-e Bashar va Aḥkām-e Ejtemāeī-e Islam”. 42 Eshkevari, “Reformist Islam and Modern Society”, 162. 43 Eshkevari, Taʾamulāt-e tanhāeī, 109. 44 Cited in Schwerin, The Dissident Mullah, 151. 45 Ibid. 46 Eshkevari, Taʾamulāt-e tanhāeī, 82–4. 47 Soroush, Expansion of Prophetic Experience, 177. 48 Eshkevari, Taʾamulāt-e tanhāeī, 88–93. 49 Ibid., 88. 50 Eshkevari, “Reformist Islam and Modern Society”, 160. 51 Eshkevari, Taʾamulāt-e tanhāeī, 126. 52 Ibid., 127. 53 Ibid., 129–30. 54 Ibid., 131. 55 Ibid., 136. 56 Ibid., 138. 1 Farhang Rajaee, Islamism and Modernism: The Changing Discourse in Iran (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2007), 214–5. 2 Mohsen Kadivar, Ḥaq al-nās: Islam va Ḥuqūq-e Bashar [The Rights of People: Islam and Human Rights] (Tehran: Kavir Publication, 2008), 17. 3 Yasuyuki Matsunaga, “Mohsen Kadivar: An Advocate of Postrevivalist Islam in Iran”, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 34, no. 3 (2007): 328. 4 Cited in Rajaee, Islamism and Modernism, 208. 5 Kadivar, Ḥaq al-nās, 37. 6 Ibid., 160. 7 Ibid., 40. 8 Madaninejad, “New Theology”, 103. 9 Ibid. 10 Kadivar, Ḥaq al-nās, 15. 11 Ibid., 15–6. 12 Ibid., 16. 13 Ibid., 37. 14 Ibid., 121. 15 Mohsen Kadivar, “Human Rights and Intellectual Islam”, in New Directions in Islamic Thought: Exploring Reform and Muslim Tradition, ed. Kari Vogt, Lena Larsen, and Christian Moe (New York, NY: I. B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2009), 51; see also Kadivar, Ḥaq al-nās, 25–6, 120–1. 16 Ibid., 16. 17 Ibid., 39–40. 18 Ibid., 146. 19 Kadivar, “Human Rights”, 65. See also Akbar and Saeed, “Interpretation and Mutability”, 448–9. 20 Kadivar, Ḥaq al-nās, 141–2. 21 Hasan Yousefi-Eshkevari, “Rethinking Men’s Authority Over Women: Qiwāma, Wilāya and Their Underlying Assumptions”, in Gender and Equality in Muslim Family Law: Justice and Ethics in Islamic Legal Tradition, trans. Ziba Mir Hos- seini, ed. Ziba Mir-Hosseini et al. (London: I. B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2013), 207. 22 Kadivar, Ḥaq al-nās, 139. 23 Ibid., 146. 24 Ibid., 40. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid., 121. 27 Mohsen Kadivar, “From Traditional Islam to Islam as an End in Itself”, Die Welt des Islams 51, nos. 3–4 (2011): 460. 28 See Yasuyuki Matsunaga, “Human Rights and New Jurisprudence in Mohsen Kadivar’s Advocacy of New-Thinker Islam”, Die Welt des Islams 51, nos. 3–4 (2011): 371. 29 Mohsen Kadivar, Daghdagheh-hāye Ḥokūmat-e Dīnī [The Concerns of Reli- gious State] (Tehran: Ney Publication, 2000), 615. 30 Kadivar, Ḥaq al-nās, 39. 31 Ibid., 146. 32 Kadivar, “Human Rights”, 66. 33 Kadivar, Ḥaq al-nās, 31. 34 For details, see Matsunaga, “Human Rights”, 375–6. 35 Kadivar, Ḥaq al-nās, 16. 36 Ibid., 40–1. 37 Ibid., 290–1, 145–6. 38 Rajaee, Islamism and Modernism, 220. 39 Kadivar, Ḥaq al-nās, 33. 40 Ibid., 30. 41 Cited in Matsunaga, “Human Rights”, 373. 42 Kadivar, “Human Rights”, 66. 43 Kadivar, Ḥaq al-nās, 31. 44 Mohsen Kadivar, “Revisiting Women’s Rights in Islam: Egalitarian Justice in Lieu of Deserts-Based Justice”, in Gender and Equality in Muslim Family Law: Justice and Ethics in Islamic Legal Tradition, trans. Ziba Mir Hosseini, ed. Ziba Mir-Hosseini et al. (London: I. B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2013), 214. 45 Ibid., 225. 46 Kadivar, Ḥaq al-nās, 41. 47 Mohsen Kadivar, “Az Islam-e Tarīkhī be Islam-e Maʿnavī” [“From Historical Islam to Spiritual Islam”], in Sonnat va sekuralism [Tradition and Secularism], ed. Abdulkarim Soroush, Mustafa Malekian, and Mohsen Kadivar (Tehran: Serat Publication, 2009), 429. 48 Kadivar, Ḥaq al-nās, 136. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid. 51 Kadivar, “From Traditional Islam”, 483. 52 For more discussions see Ghobadzadeh, Religious Secularity, 116. 53 Kadivar, Ḥaq al-nās, 160. 54 Ibid. 55 Mohsen Kadivar, “ ‘Ijtihad’ in Usul al-Fiqh: Reforming Islamic Thought through Structural ‘Ijtihad’ ”, Iran Nameh 30, no. 3 (2015): XXIV. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid. 1 The only work in which Fanaei’s project is briefly explained as far as we know is Badamchi, Post-Islamist Political Theory, 7–8. 2 Ibid., 7. 3 Abolqasem Fanaei, Akhlāq-e Dīn-shenāsī: Pajūheshī dar Bāb-e Mabānī-e Akhlāqī va Maʿrefat- shenāsī-e Feqh [The Ethics of Religious Studies: Research on the Ethical and Epistemological Bases of Fiqh] (Tehran: Negah-e No Publica- tion, 2013), 422–3. 4 Ibid., 407. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., 411. 7 Ibid., 460. 8 Ibid., 456–7. 9 Ibid., 457. 10 Ibid., 437. Fanaei cited Soroush: “What Shah Wali Allah is saying . . . is that the Prophet’s words and deeds among his own people were simply intended to serve as a model; it was not as if everyone, everywhere was expected to behave in exactly the same way, for ever more. They must be seen and taken as concrete cases of general principles. Different peoples must seek and find the applications of general principles as appropriate for them”. Soroush, The Expansion of Pro- phetic Experience, 31–2. 11 Fanaei, Akhlāq-e Dīn-shenāsī, 428. 12 Ibid., 438. 13 Ibid., 439. 14 Ibid., 441. 15 Ibid., 439. 16 Rahman, Islam and Modernity, 6. 17 Ibid., 441. 18 Ibid., 441–2. 19 Soroush, Expansion of Prophetic Experience, 19. 20 Fanaei, Akhlagh-e Din-shenasi, 395. 21 Ibid., 398–9. 22 Ibid., 424. 23 Ibid., 400. 24 Ibid., 521. 25 Ibid., 483. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., 504. 1 Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, “Mostafa Malekian: Spirituality, Siyasat-Zadegi and (A) political Self-Improvement”, Digest of Middle East Studies 23, no. 2 (2014): 284. 2 Ibid., 282. 3 Ibid., 289. 4 Mostafa Malekian, “Maʿnavīyat: Gohar-e Adiyān (1)” [“Spirituality: The Essence of Religions (1)”], in Sonnat va sekularism [Tradition and Secularism] (Tehran: Serat Publication, 2009), 268–70. 5 Ibid., 274–5. Malekian states that when one is obedient – from a religious per- spective – one should endorse a particular proposition only because a religious authority says so. 6 Ibid., 279–81. 7 Ibid., 280–2. 8 Ibid., 283–4. 9 Ibid., 273. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., 283. 12 Ibid., 275. 13 Mostafa Malekian, “Maʿnavīyat: Gohar-e Adiyān (2)” [“Spirituality: The Essence of Religions (2)”], in Sonnat va sekularism [Tradition and Secularism] (Tehran: Serat Publication, 2009), 339. 14 Malekian, “Maʿnavīyat: Gohar-e Adiyān (1)”, 280; Mostafa Malekian, Moshtaqī va Mahjūrī: Goftegūī dar bāb-e Farhang va Sīyāsat [Longing and Separation: Dialogues in Culture and Politics], 4th ed. (Tehran: Nashr-e negah-e Moaser, 2010), 321. 15 Mostafa Malekian, “Porsesh-hāeī Pīrāmūn-e Maʿnavīyat” [“Some Questions About Spirituality”], in Sonnat va sekularism [Tradition and Secularism] (Teh- ran: Serat Publication, 2009), 378. 16 Mostafa Malekian, “Secularism va Ḥokūmat-e Dīnī” [“Secularism and Reli- gious Government”], in Sonnat va sekularism [Tradition and Secularism] (Teh- ran: Serat Publication, 2009), 263. 17 Mostafa Malekian, Rāhī beh Rahāeī: Jostār-hāyeī dar ʿAqlanīyat va Maʿnavīyat [A Path to Emancipation: Essays on Rationality and Spirituality], 5th ed. (Teh- ran: Nashr-e negah-e moaser, 2010), 376. Therefore, the word “spirituality”, as used by Malekian, is different from that used by such religious intellectuals as Mohsen Kadivar or even Shabestari. 18 Tavassoli, Christian Encounters with Iran, 162. 19 Mostafa Malekian, Dīn, Maʿnavīyat va Rowshanfekrī-e Dīnī: Seh goftogū bā Mostafa Malekian [Religion, Spirituality and Religious Intellectualism: Three Conversations with Mostafa Malekian] (Tehran: Nashr-e payan, 2010), 48. 20 Ibid., 48–9. 21 Malekian, “Maʿnavīyat: Gohar-e Adiyān (1)”, 285. 22 Ibid., 286. 23 Ibid., 278. 24 For example, see Soroush, “Muhammad”. 25 Mostafa Malekian, Gorīz-e Maʿnavī (n.d.), 16. We have used the PDF ver- sion of the book available on https://3danet.ir/%DA%AF%D8%B1%DB% 8C%D8%B2-%D9%85%D8%B9%D9%86%D9%88%DB%8C/. 26 Ibid., 15. 27 Malekian, Rāhī beh Rahāeī, 125. 28 Tavassoli, Christian Encounters With Iran, 168. 29 Malekian, “Secularism va Ḥokūmat-e Dīnī”, 246–8. For Malekian, “with sub- jective human beliefs, we lack an interpersonal validity criterion that we can appeal to which to settle intellectual and doctrinal disagreement, while at least in principle, with the objective ones, we have such as criterion to appeal to in order to settle our disagreement” (Badamchi, Post-Islamist Political Theory, 163). 30 Tavassoli, Christian Encounters with Iran, 174. 31 Mostafa Malekian, “Maʿnavīyat: Gohar-e Adiyān (2)”, 339. This approach to spirituality echoes some aspects of modern Christian theology, rooted in the writings of Schleiermacher, in which the essence of religion is located in feeling or experiencing the transcendent. 32 Badamchi, Post-Islamist Political Theory, 167. 33 Malekian, Moshtaqī va Mahjūrī, 369–70. See also: Ali Akbar, Abdullah Saeed, “Interpretation and Mutability”, 447–8. 34 Malekian, Rāhī beh Rahāeī, 480. 35 Ibid., 501. 36 Malekian, “Maʿnavīyat: Gohar-e Adiyān (1)”, 285. 37 Malekian, Moshtaqī va Mahjūrī, 401. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid., 400–1. 40 Ibid., 401–2. 41 Cited in Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, “Mostafa Malekian”, 290. 42 Malekian, Moshtaqī va Mahjūrī, 278. 43 Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, “Mostafa Malekian”, 298. 44 Malekian, “Porsesh-hāeī Pīrāmūn-e Maʿnavīyat”, 352. 45 Malekian, Moshtaqī va Mahjūrī, 195, 277. 46 Malekian, “Maʿnavīyat: Gohar-e Adiyān (1)”, 270. 47 Ibid., 278. 48 Malekian, Moshtaqī va Mahjūrī, 277. 49 Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, “Mostafa Malekian”, 294. 50 Malekian, Rāhī beh Rahāeī, 302. 51 Malekian, “Maʿnavīyat: Gohar-e Adiyān (1)”, 286. 52 Malekian, Rāhī beh Rahāeī, 465. 53 Ibid., 304. 54 Ibid., 305. 55 Ibid. 1 Sanam Vakili, Women and Politics in the Islamic Republic of Iran: Action and Reaction (New York, NY: Continuum Book, 2011), 136. 2 Ibid., 151. 3 Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Islam and Gender: The Religious Debate in Contemporary Iran (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 215. 4 Ibid., 259. 5 Ibid., 263. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid., 265. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., 266. 10 Shireen T. Hunter, “Islamic Reformist Discourse in Iran: Proponents and Pros- pects”, in Reformist Voices of Islam: Mediating Islam and Modernity, ed. Shireen T. Hunter (New York, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2008), 74. 11 Sayyid Mohsen Saidzadeh, “Fiqh and Fiqahat”, UCLA Journal of Islamic and Near Eastern Studies 1 (2002): 257. 12 Mir-Hosseini, Islam and Gender, 259. 13 Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, “Hujjat al-Islam Mohsen Saidzadeh: A Contemporary Iranian Cleric on Fiqh, Women and Civil Society”, UCLA Journal of Islamic and Near Eastern Studies 1 (2002): 231. 14 Saidzadeh, “Fiqh and Fiqahat”, 259. 15 Ibid., 256. 16 Mir-Hosseini, Islam and Gender, 250. 17 Saidzadeh, “Fiqh and Fiqahat”, 256. 18 Ahmad Qabel, Aḥkām-e Bānovān dar Sharīʿat-e Moḥammadī [Precepts on Women in Muhammad’s Sharīʿa] (Shariʿat-e Aqlani Publication, 2013), 161. 19 Ahmad Qabel, Sharīʿat-e ʿAqlānī: Maqālātī dar Nesbat-e ʿAql va Sharʿ [The Rational Sharīʿa: Essays on the Relation Between Reason and Religion] (Shariʿat-e Aqlani Publication, 2012), 53–5. This book is available at www. ghabel.net. 20 Ibid., 55. 21 Qabel, Aḥkām-e Bānovān dar Sharīʿat-e Moḥammadī, 45. 22 Ibid., 45–7. 23 Ibid., 48. 24 Ibid., 50. 25 Qabel, Sharīʿat-e ʿAqlānī, 50. 26 “Bi-ma faddala Allahu badahum ala badin” literally means that God has pre- ferred some of them over some. 27 Qabel, Aḥkām-e Bānovān dar Sharīʿat-e Moḥammadī, 24. 28 Ibid., 25–6. 29 Kadivar, Ḥaq al-nās, 306. 30 Ibid., 290. 31 Ibid., 289. 32 Ibid., 290–1. 33 Kadivar, “Revisiting Women’s Rights”, 214. 34 Kadivar, Ḥaq al-nās, 303. 35 Ibid., 308. 36 Ibid., 294. 37 Ibid., 302–3. 38 Kadivar, “Revisiting Women’s Rights”, 228. 39 Kadivar, Ḥaq al-nās, 295. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid., 292–6. 42 Ibid., 295. 43 Kadivar, “Revisiting Women’s Rights”, 228. 44 Ibid. 45 Kadivar, Ḥaq al-nās, 290–1. 46 Kadivar, “Revisiting Women’s Rights”, 214. 47 Kadivar, Ḥaq al-nās, 307. 48 Kadivar, “Revisiting Women’s Rights”, 225. 49 Ibid., 223. 50 Ibid., 226. 51 Ibid., 229. 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid., 224. 54 Ibid., 215. 55 Ibid., 216. 56 Ibid., 215. 57 Ibid. 58 Kadivar, Ḥaq al-nās, 16. 59 Ibid., 315. 60 Ibid., 317. 61 Ibid., 319–20. 62 Ibid., 321. 63 Eshkevari, “Ḥuqūq va Manzelat-e Zan dar Islam-e No-andīshāneh”; Eshkevari, “Rethinking Men’s Authority”, 193. 64 Ibid., 194. 65 Ibid., 195. 66 Ibid., 197. 67 Ibid. 68 Eshkevari, “Women’s Rights”, 169–70. 69 Eshkevari, “Rethinking Men’s Authority”, 193. 70 Ibid. 71 Ibid., 194. 72 Eshkevari, “Ḥuqūq va Manzelat-e Zan dar Islam-e No-andīshāneh”. See also: Akbar and Saeed, “Interpretation and Mutability”, 452–3. 73 Eshkevari, “Ḥuqūq va Manzelat-e Zan dar Islam-e No-andīshāneh”. 74 Ibid.; Eshkevari, “Rethinking Men’s Authority”, 195. 75 Eshkevari, “Ḥuqūq va Manzelat-e Zan dar Islam-e No-andīshāneh”. 76 Eshkevari, “Rethinking Men’s Authority”, 202. 77 Eshkevari, “Ḥuqūq va Manzelat-e Zan dar Islam-e No-andīshāneh”. 78 Ibid. 79 Ibid. 80 Ibid. 81 Eshkevari, “Women’s Rights”, 169; see also Eshkevari, “Fiqh, Ekhtelāfāt-e Fiqhī va Taghīr-pazīrī-e Aḥkām”. 82 Eshkevari, “Women’s Rights”, 169. 1 Soroush, Expansion of Prophetic Experience, 143–4. 2 Abdolkarim Soroush, Ṣirāṭ-hāy-e Mostaqīm [The Straight Paths] (Tehran: Sirat Publication, 1998), 4. 3 Soroush, Expansion of Prophetic Experience, 67. 4 Ibid., 123. 5 Ibid., 120. 6 Ibid., 122–3. 7 John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 241. 8 Ibid., 236. 9 Soroush, Expansion of Prophetic Experience, 157. 10 Ibid., 123. 11 Ibid., 125. 12 Ibid., 130. 13 Ibid., 127. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., 132. 16 Ibid., 142. For further discussion see Ali Akbar, “ʿAbdolkarim Soroush’s Approach to ‘Experience’ as a Basis for His Reform Project”, Islam and Christian- Muslim Relations 28, no.3 (2017): 323–6. 17 Kadivar, Ḥaq al-nās, 110. 18 Mohsen Kadivar, “Freedom of Religion and Belief in Islam”, in Mehran Kam- rava, The New Voices of Islam: Reforming Politics and Modernity, a Reader (London: I. B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2009), 128. 19 Ibid., 123–5. 20 Ibid., 126. 21 Kadivar, “ ‘Ijtihad’ in Usul al-Fiqh”, XXV. 22 Mohsen Kadivar, Mojāzāt-e Ertedād va Azādī-e Mazhab: Naqd-e Mojāzāt-e Ertedād bā Mavāzīn-e Fiqh-e Estedlālī [The Punishment of Apostasy and Free- dom of Religion: Criticism of the Punishment of Apostasy Based on Rational Fiqh] (2014), 308. A PDF version is available on www.kadivar.com. 23 Kadivar, Ḥaq al-nās, 182. 24 Ibid., 190–1. 25 Ibid., 208. 26 Mohsen Kadivar, “Islam-e Raḥmānī” [“Compassionate Islam”], 2010, http:// kadivar.com/?p=12. 27 Ibid. 28 Kadivar, “Freedom of Religion”, 134. 29 Ibid., 135. 30 Ibid., 135–6. 31 Abdullah Saeed and Hassan Saeed, Freedom of Religion, Apostasy and Islam (Surrey: Ashghate, 2004), 55; Yohanan Friedmann, Tolerance and Coercion in Islam: Interfaith Relations in the Muslim Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 121–3. 32 Saeed and Saeed, Freedom of Religion, 54. 33 Ibid., 52. The Hanafis often based this view on the Prophet’s general prohibition against killing women and children. There is also a ḥadīth narrated by Ibn Abbas stating that “women are not to be killed when they renounce Islam. They are to be imprisoned, summoned to Islam and forced to embrace it”. Friedmann, Toler- ance and Coercion, 135–9. 34 Rudolph Peters and Gert J. J. De Vries, “Apostasy in Islam”, Die welt des Islams 17 (1976–1977): 5. 35 Mahmoud Ayoub, “Religious Freedom and the Law of Apostasy in Islam”, Islamochristiana 20 (1994): 86–7. 36 Kadivar, “Freedom of Religion”, 138–9. 37 Kadivar, Mojāzāt-e Ertedād va Azādī-e Mazhab, 242–3. 38 Kadivar, Ḥaq al-nās, 203. 39 Kadivar, Mojāzāt-e Ertedād va Azādī-e Mazhab, 243. 40 His main arguments are available at Ayatollah Fazel Lankarani, “Responding to Questions Concerning Jurisprudential Fatwa on Apostasy”, accessed 27 Sep- tember 2017, www.rahesabz.net/story/46249/. For arguments in favor of the necessity of killing an apostate see pp.39-41 of this book. 41 Lankarani, “Responding to Questions Concerning Jurisprudential Fatwa on Apostasy”. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid. 46 Mohsen Kadivar, “Nā-sāzgārī-e Ḥokm-e Qatl-e Mortad bā Moḥkamāt-e Qurʾān” [“The Inconsistency Between Punishments of Ertedād and the ‘Muḥkamat’ of the Qurʾān”], 2011, http://kadivar.com/?p=13711. 47 Kadivar, “Freedom of Religion”, 141. 48 Kadivar, Mojāzāt-e Ertedād va Azādī-e Mazhab, 12; Ibid., 322. 49 Kadivar, “Freedom of Religion”, 129. 50 For the Ayatollah Montazeri’s arguments about apostasy, see Sussan Siavoshi, Montazeri: The Life and Thought of Iran’s Revolutionary Ayatollah (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 251. 51 Ahmad Qabel, aḥkām-e Jazāyeī dar Sharīʿat-e moḥammadī [Criminal Sentences in Muhammad’s Sharīʿa] (Shariʿat-e Aqlani Publication, 2013), 84–90. 1 Kadivar, Ḥaq al-nās, 118. 2 Ibid., 120. 3 Kadivar, “ ‘Ijtihad’ in Usul al-Fiqh”, XXV. 4 Kadivar, “Human Rights”, 48. 5 For a comprehensive study on this topic, see Madaninejad, “New Theology”, 30–1. 6 Mohsen Kadivar, “Wilayat al-faqih and Democracy”, in Islam, the State and Political Authority: Medieval Issues and Modern Concerns, ed. Asma Afsarud- din (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 220. 7 Mohsen Kadivar, “Islam va Demokrāsī, Sāzgārī yā Nā-sāzgārī” [“Islam and Democracy: Compatibility or Incompatibility”], 2004, http://kadivar. com/?p=251. 8 Kadivar, “ ‘Ijtihad’ in Usul al-Fiqh”, XXVII. 9 Ibid., XXVI. 10 For details, see Rajaee, Islamism and Modernism, 219–20; Hunter, “Islamic Reformist Discourse”, 68. 11 Cited in Naser Ghobadzadeh, “Islamic Reformation Discourses, Popular Sover- eignty and Religious Secularization in Iran”, Democratization 19, no. 2 (2012): 338; see also Kadivar, “Islam-e Raḥmānī”. 12 Mohsen Kadivar, “I Am Thinking About a Secular Democratic Government”, accessed 15 April 2017, http://tehranreview.net/articles/7425. 13 Kadivar, Daghdagheh-hāye Ḥokūmat-e Dīnī, 205–6. 14 Ibid., 615. 15 Ibid. 16 Kadivar, “Islam-e Raḥmānī”. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Eshkevari, “Faithful Life”, 24. 20 Eshkevari, “Ḥuqūq va Manzelat-e Zan dar Islam-e No-andīshāneh”. 21 Eshkevari, “Ḥuqūq-e Bashar va Aḥkām-e Ejtemāeī-e Islam”. 22 Eshkevari, “Islamic Democratic Government”, 87. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid. 25 Eshkevari, “Women’s Rights”, 98–9. 26 Eshkevari, “Faithful Life”, 25; Eshkevari, “Islamic Democratic Government”, 92. 27 Eshkevari, “Faithful Life”, 24. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 30 Eshkevari, “Islamic Democratic Government”, 84. 31 Ibid., 84–5. 32 Ibid., 85. 33 Eshkevari, “Reformist Islam”, 162. 34 Eshkevari, “Faithful Life”, 25–6. 35 Ibid., 26. 36 Ibid., 25. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid. 39 Shabestari, Hermenutīk, Kitāb va Sonnat, 60. 40 Ibid., 59–60. 41 Shabestari, Imān va Āzādī, 86–8. 42 Shabestari, Naqdī bar Qerāʾat-e Rasmī az Dīn, 517. 43 Shabestari, Hermenutīk, Kitāb va Sonnat, 69. 44 Muhammad Mojtahed Shabestari, Taʾamolātī dar Qerāʾat-e Ensānī az Dīn [Some Ideas About Human Interpretation of Religion] (Tehran: Tarhe No, 2004), 147. 45 Ibid., 155. 46 Shabestari, Naqdī bar Qerāʾat-e Rasmī az Dīn, 512. 47 Mehdi Bazargan, “Seyr-e Andisheh Dini-e Moaser: Goftegui ba Mohandes Mehdi Bazargan” [“An Exploration of the Contemporary Religious Thought: A Conversation With Bazargan”], Kiyan, no. 11 (1993): 8; cited in Mir-Hosseini and Tapper, Islam and Democracy in Iran, 68. 48 Shabestari, Naqdī bar Qerāʾat-e Rasmī az Dīn, 278. 49 Ibid., 517. 50 Muhammad Mojtahed Shabestari, “Ḥaq, Taklīf va Ḥokūmat”, accessed 20 April 2017, http://library.tebyan.net/fa/Viewer/Text/77304/1. 51 Muhammad Mojtahed Shabestari, “Ḥuqūq-e Bashar Eslāmī nemishavad vali Mosalmānān bāyad ān rā bepazirand” [“Human Rights Is Not Islamic, but Mus- lims Must Accept It”], 2016, http://mohammadmojtahedshabestari.com /. 52 Muhammad Mojtahed Shabestari, “Why Islam and Democracy Go Well Together”, 2012, https://en.qantara.de/content/interview-with-mohammad- mojtahed-shabestari-why-islam-and-democracy-go-well-together. 53 Shabestari, Taʾamolātī dar Qerāʾat-e Ensānī az Dīn, 137–52; Shabestari, Naqdī bar Qerāʾat-e Rasmī az Dīn, 25–7, 191–206. 54 Shabestari, Imān va Āzādī, 60–1. 55 Ibid., 29. 56 Shabestari, Hermenutīk, Kitāb va Sonnat, 295. 57 Shabestari, Imān va Āzādī, 23. 58 Ibid., 32. 59 Cited in Shahibzadeh, Islamism and Post-Islamism in Iran, 144. 60 Shabestari, Hermenutīk, Kitāb va Sonnat, 184. 61 Shabestari, Imān va Āzādī, 28. 62 Ibid. 63 Ibid., 42. 64 Shabestari, Naqdī bar Qerāʾat-e Rasmī az Dīn, 146–7. 65 Shabestari, Hermenutīk, Kitāb va Sonnat, 97–8. 66 Shabestari, Imān va Āzādī, 29. 67 Shabestari, Naqdī bar Qerāʾat-e Rasmī az Dīn, 11. 68 Ibid. 69 Ibid., 37–8. 70 Muhammad Mojtahed Shabestari, “Islam Is a religion, Not a Political Agenda”, 2008, https://en. qantara.de/content/interview-with-mohammad-mojtahed- shabestari-part-1-islam-is-a-religion-not-a-political-0. 71 Shabestari, “Why Islam and Democracy”. 72 Rajaee, Islamism and Modernism, 225. 73 Soroush, Reason, Freedom, 61. 74 Ibid., 127. 75 Abdolkarim Soroush, Farbeh-tar az Ideolojy [Loftier Than Ideology] (Tehran: Sirat Publication, 1994), 147. 76 Ibid., 136–7. 77 Ibid., 155. 78 Soroush, Expansion of Prophetic Experience, 152. 79 Ghobadzadeh, Religious Secularity, 93. 80 Ibid. 81 Soroush, Reason, Freedom, 128. 82 Ibid., 153. 83 Ibid., 128. 84 Ghobadzadeh, Religious Secularity, 206. 85 Cited in Badamchi, Post-Islamist Political Theory, 84. 86 Soroush, Reason, Freedom, 132. 87 Ibid., 128. 88 Soroush, Reason, Freedom, 132. 89 Ibid., 56. 90 See Abdolkarim Soroush, “Language of Rights and Language of Obligations: An Islamic Perspective”, 5 June 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YI--tefKok. 91 Abu Zayd has also raised similar political theory. For a discussion about Abu Zayd’s political theory see Ali Akbar, “The Political Discourses of Three Con- temporary Muslim Scholars: Secular, Nonsecular, or Pseudosecular?” Digest of Middle East Studies 25, no. 2 (2016): 396–8. Bibliography

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