Principled Democracy in the Thought of Morteza Motahhari

With the victory of the Islamic Revolution and establishment of a religious democracy in Iran, the question about compatibility of Islam and democracy has become a fundamental issue. This article aims to answer whether it is possible to locate origins of the theory of religious democracy in pre-Revolutionary Islamic thinkers. The hypothesis of the article is that it is possible to find a pattern for religious democracy in the thought of the religious scholars such as Morteza Motahhari, which served as a pioneer for theoretical debates in this field. The article uses the current-discourse method to obtain Motahhari’s views about democracy and its relation with religious democracy and its established form in the Islamic Republic of Iran.