An Unorthodox, Islamic, Full Justification for Liberal Citizenship: The Case of Mohammad Mojtahed Shabestari

Abstract

This chapter is mainly devoted to Mohammad Mojtehed Shabestari’s political theology. I argue that the various strategies in Shabestari’s reformist project can be labeled as an exemplary conjecture, albeit not exactly in the sense proposed by March. Shabestari’s first strategy is showing that Islamic faith is impossible unless believers are guaranteed freedom of conscience. The second strategy is a call to revise political jurisprudence in the modern era to make it compatible with human rights. In doing so, Shabestari distinguishes between the essentials of Islam, which for him include the existential endorsement of the oneness of God at a personal level and justice in the public realm, and its incidentals, arguing that what must be preserved in modern times are the religion’s essentials rather than its incidental or temporary parts. The third strategy, similarly to the second strategy, calls for a revision of political jurisprudence by showing that the hermeneutical approach adopted by the mainstream jurists is just one method among a variety of hermeneutical approaches available for reading a religious text. This leads to an argument for religious pluralism that, as I will show in the fifth section of this chapter, is similar to Abdolkarim Soroush’s argument for religious pluralism, based on his theory of expansion and contraction of religious knowledge. This fifth section also includes a note on Soroush’s idea of a ‘post-theocratic state’, which transcends fiqh but remains committed to morality. This chapter ends with some critical remarks on Shabestari’s Islamic, full justification for liberal citizenship.