Religious Inquiries
Volume:12 Issue: 1, Winter-spring 2023

This article investigates Ayatollah Murtada Mutahhari’s understanding of the principle of justice and its impact on women’s social participation. Mutahhari (1919-1979) is one of the foremost thinkers of contemporary Iran who proposed a new theoretical foundation for the study of women’s rights based on rational-philosophical principles. Treating justice and natural rights as meta-jurisprudential principles, he supported women’s public life. Although Many studies have been conducted on Mutahhari’s views on women’s rights and have made significant contributions to the study of Mutahhari’s thought in terms of describing and examining his arguments, my article has certain features which distinguish it from previous studies. I pay particular attention to Mutahhari’s philosophical methodology of writing on gender-related issues particularly his approach to the principle of justice in his ijtihad methodology because I believe his ideas are the significant outcome of his rational methodology of ijtihad. In addition, most studies on Mutahhari’s thought on women’s questions mainly concentrated on his views on women’s familial rights, however, his contribution to women’s public life has been ignored. This study reveals that by adopting Mutahhari’s views of the principle of justice and its position in Islamic jurisprudence, different understandings of female social participation could be developed.

"The Essence and Shell of Religion" is a philosophico-theological problem which is Occidental in its context and temporally belongs to Renaissance. "Religious Experience" and "Sophia Perennis" are two mooted theories on this issue. The essence of religion, according to first theory, lies in the experience that makes its possessor to be seen religious and the shell is a set of beliefs that has its origin in the independence that the wayfarer feels after touching the essence and the second theory defines religion as a bisurficial phenomenon whose inward surface is monotheism which is manifested in the form of Sophia Perennis inside human being and the shell is consisted of traditions that leads the wayfarer toward the gem. In Islamic mysticism, religion is an integrated and seamless truth that has triple manifestations of exoteric, esoteric and ultra-esoteric. The esoteric manifestation is the individual unity which is also gem of religion and though they are seen as the shell exoteric manifestations are merely diluted shadows of the same esoteric truth and thus they are imperishable. Religiosity is also a threefold truth whose essence is the absolutely certain intuition of mystic monotheism; and thus conceived, religion and religiosity are coextensive in their essence.

The problem of salvation—that is, the deliverance from sins—is an issue Muslim intellectuals are expected to solve. Ibn Taymiyya’s response to the problem accounts for some of the conducts of contemporary Muslims and events of the Islamic world today. Drawing on the documentary-library method and adopting a descriptive-analytic approach, we argue thatfor Ibn Taymiyya, salvation can be imagined in one of the two forms: (i) only the followers of Islam achieve salvation, and followers of other religions will achieve salvation only if they join Islam; from this we might conclude that Ibn Taymiyya believed in “religious exclusivism,” which given the principles of Islam and those of Ibn Taymiyya’s thought, can be portrayed as against religious prejudice and violence and as compatible with tolerance as well as learning from other religions—a recommendation made by Strenmark (2006, 73) for prejudiced exclusivist leaders.(ii) given the factors leading to wretchedness, such as disbelief, heresy, and polytheism, Ibn Taymiyya’s circle of salvation does not even encompass all Muslims—his salvation is limited to only one Islamic sect. This is a construal of Ibn Taymiyya’s view adopted by excommunicative (takfīrī) Salafists, to which we shall refer in this paper as “sectarian exclusivism.”

What does mean the age of the world picture, and what is its relationship with human being’s life? Answering such questions concerning human being’s meaning of life in the age of the world picture has its special significance, since this age represents an age that modern human being has destroyed his/her traditional relations with the whole system of being, and based on his/her modern rationality has built a new world relying on his/her willing. In this pictured modern world, the identity and reality of all affairs of the world have been redefined based on modern human being’s understanding and will. Some essential virtues of this age are humanism, atheism, agnosticism, scientism, secularism, moral relativism, demystification of the world and ignoring death. Some critics consider it as the age of the whole meaningless human being’s life, while by deep consideration of some factors, like goal, value and function, concerning the semantic meaning of life, it can be said such a life is meaningful but has temporal and limited meaning.

This article examines the intricate dialectics between colonialism, Salafism and the first glimpses of an Algerian nation throughout the interwar period. Founded in 1931, the Association of the Muslim Algerian Ulama (AMAU) embarked on defining the – French dominated – ummah [nation] on cultural and religious terms. By the same token, it aspired to reform the intellectual conditions of the Sunni populace via schools and weekly journals for the steadily growing Arabic-speaking readership. It is against such backdrop, that an old/new fault line was brought in the foreground of the Algerian salafī/iṣlāḥī discourse: the ‘authenticity’ of the scripts as opposed to the ‘heterodox’ ritualism and superstitions of Sufism. By applying the lens of postcolonial theory, it is suggested that the anti-Sufi content of the Association’s journals, reflected the cultural re-codifications of the French ‘Mission Civilisatrice’, albeit in the shape of a restored Islamic orthodoxy coupled with the ambitious ethnoreligious reconstruction of Algeria.

The present article deals with the nature of revelation from Sayyed Ḥeydar Amoli’s viewpoint by an analytic method. In his works, especially in his most important exegesis of the Quran, under the title Al-Muḥiț al- ‘Aḍam, he has used words and expressions which clearly indicate that he considers the Qur'anic verses (revelation) to be, by nature, the outcome of a divine act in terms of both form and meaning. In several occasions, he explicitly states that the Qur'anic verses are the Words of Allah revealed to the Prophet. No modifications were made by the prophet in the words of Allah. Our evidences in this article show that, in spite of the fact that the concept of prophetic experience and the propositional model of revelation have been attributed to mystics, Sayyed Ḥeydar, as a mystic, rejects those views which consider revelation as a prophetic experience or as a propositional revelation. Rather, he considers it as a divine act, not as the act of the prophet. The more detailed discussion of this issue can be seen in the contents of this article.

The following article is written after my first article on the subject of astronomical hypotheses in the Roman mysteries of Mithras. In the first article, I suggested that tauroctony symbology is not a map entirely derived from astronomical theology, and perhaps non-astrological mythological symbols and narratives are also applied. In this article, I have tried to survey the most important myths related to tauroctony in the Indo-European regions and to observe the hypotheses of modern Mithra researchers in explaining the motifs and mythological symbols of the tauroctony sculpture based on library data. In the end, I have concluded that, firstly, the Roman tauroctony’s sculpture, as was the habit of the Romans, does not only narrate one myth but compared to the previous myths, it narrates at least three tauroctony myths and borrows symbols from each of them: first the myth of the battle of Gilgamesh with the Bull of Heaven and its slaying, the second is the slaying of the Hadyusha by Saoshyanet and the third is the myth of the Gavaevodata. Also, in the part of Mithra's fight with the bull and its hunt, there are similarities with the myth of Hercules's battle with the Cretan bull.

Besides a variety of approaches to the reality of the plurality of religion, a few of Muslim mystics have reflected on the issue from a mystical perspective according to the socio-political conditions of their time. Among such mystics, one can mention two prominent mystics of the middle centuries of Islam, i.e., ʿAyn al-Quḍāt Hamedānī and ‘Azīz al-Din Nasafī. In the present study, in addition to comparing the thoughts of the two mystics, their approaches to the issue of unity and plurality of religions are examined in a comparative-analytical manner. It is also shown that although both mystics believe in the existence of a common principle in all religions, how ʿAyn al-Quḍāt has highlighted the linguistic and translation errors as factors resulting in the plurality of religion based on his hermeneutic views, while Nasafī, based on the theory of the unity of existence, has emphasized the plurality in literals as well as belief in an invented god. On the other hand, because they accept spiritual experiences and collective wisdom as criteria for the verity of religions, both mystics have attempted to show why spiritual experiences, which are rooted in a divine reality, have changed and distorted over time.

the present study investigated the status of the studies conducted in Islam’s field, employing scientometric methods. Extracted from Web of Science database, 6837 articles were surveyed for the growth rate, core journals, core authors, average citation rate, effective authors, countries’ contributions, lexical co-occurrence map, most frequent key terms, thematic domains and published formats. Ravar Matrix, USI Net and R environment were utilized to analyze the data. The findings indicated that the studies on Islam's field have had an ascending trend; studies are published more in article format, the average citation rate to the outputs in Islam's field shows a rise from 2008 to 2008 and a fall from 2008 to 2020; Christianity was the most frequent discussed subject in the studies on Islam’s field, key terms of “Islam”, Islamophobia” and “religion” were the most frequent key terms; Belhaj, Padela, and Prat are the most productive authors in the Islam's field; the journal ISLAM-ZEITSCHRIFT FUR GESCHICHTE UND KULTUR DES ranked first in publishing articles on Islam; and finally in terms of country, America received the first rank in publishing the outputs on Islam's field. Some suggestions are also presented by the researchers as to the implications of the research findings.