Abstract
Religious secularity: a theological challenge to the Islamic state
Highlights
Based on the lived experience of an Islamic state in Iran since 1979, Ghobadzadeh problematizes the concept of Islamic state theoretically and questions the state-religion relationship within Iranian context
Iran has been going through the first modern Islamic state experience under the rule of the clergy
Ghobadzadeh argues that the theoretical ideal of the Islamic state has been crippled with the economic, socio-political, and theological contradictions of reality, and the notion of the Islamic state has been largely contested in Iran
Summary
Religious Secularity: A Theological Challenge to the Islamic State, Naser Ghobadzadeh, Oxford University Press, 2015, 267 p. The second chapter is about the process of rise of a jurisprudential state which Ghobadzadeh refers paradoxically as seeding secularity He examines Khomeini’s introduction of the concepts of ‘absolute mandate of the jurist’ and ‘expedient fiqh’ in the early years of the Islamic state in order to justify and legitimize the political decisions by the ruling clergy that would not be religiously justified otherwise. Ghobadzadeh discusses the clerical opposition against the clericalism of the Islamic state in Iran in the fifth chapter of the book and portrays how the anti-clerical arguments within the ranks of the clergy contributed to the discourse of religious secularity. Reconsidering the dichotomous categories, Ghobadzadeh provokes the reader to think about expansion of genuine religiosity in a secular democratic political system, where religion is liberated from state intervention
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