Social justice is one of those rich and multifaceted concepts that get rendered into many contingent interpretations. Its contingency is arguably demonstrable in the discourses of modern Iranian Muslim revivalist and reformist scholars. Prior to the 1979 Revolution, discussions of social justice were heavily influenced by the Marxist and socialist discourse that focused on broad economic inequalities and class distinctions of the rich and the poor as “Mustakberin” and “Mustaz`afin”. In the post-Revolution era, however, this focus has shifted to more specific categories of social injustice such as gender inequalities and social rights of the “individual” versus the power structure of a ruling theocracy.
It is through this trajectory that more than ever before in the modern times, the necessity of new interpretations of Islamic law is felt. While the relation between religion, reason, individual’s freedom and human rights, etc., has been abundantly discussed and while many have attempted to prove their compatibility with Islam “in theory”, there have been few attempts to apply “rationality” to the existing traditional laws of the Shari`ah in such a way that would lead to new and original interpretations thereof. In the last decade, the late Ahmad Qabel, from the younger generation of Shi`i jurists, turned to be a very controversial mujtahed by offering such original fatwas. While staying within the framework of traditional methods of juridical debates, he employed rational methods of argumentation to reach different results or fatwas on issues such as hejab. He called his project “Shari`at-e `Aqlani” (rational Shari`ah). This paper examines Ahmad Qabel’s theory of Shari`at-e `Aqlani focusing on his reformist approach to interpretations of certain Shari`ah laws and their implications for social justice.
