Analysis of Science-Based Discourse by Mehdi Bazargan

The present article seeks to study and review, with scrutiny, the opinions and thoughts in the constellation of ideas by Mehdi Bazargan. Admittedly, the constellation of ideas held by Bazargan may be reviewed and identified in two intellectual stages. In his first stage of thinking, Bazargan holds a maximum consideration of religion and maintains that the Islamic teachings provide for whole human life. From the point of view of this religious intellectual, both theoretical and practical aspects as well as the manner to practice politics and macro-management and even the experimental science may be extracted from religion. In this period, Bazargan has a socio-scientific or, in other words, exogenous and political tendency to religion and tries to make compromises between science and religion. This maximum consideration held by Bazargan undergoes paradigmatic metamorphosis regarding the role of religion in society and government in his last speech titled as "God and Afterlife are the Objectives of Prophetic Mission". As a consequence, Bazargan like secular intellectuals considers the religious thinking as injurious to the worldly life and reduces the role of religion to individual thoughts. To study and criticize opinions by this religious intellectual, we should take into consideration the former and later Bazargan. The methodological approach adopted in this study is a qualitative content analysis method based on which Bazargan's works in these two stages are considered as a trackback of dominant discourse in each era. Findings of this study indicate that the intellectual religious school with a scientific approach preceded by Bazargan fades the religious principles and at last graves it into secularism and religious reductionism because of irreligious consideration and radical emphasis on using positivistic and pragmatic teachings