Religious Reformists in Iran From a Theoretical View

The religious reformists in Iran are an influential group in Iran’s political system, especially since the 1979 revolution. However, their influence has suffered since the last presidency of a reformist, Mohammad Khatami, which ended in 2005. Their intellectual leaders such as Abdolkarim Soroush or Mohsen Kadivar are in exile and have lost the possibility to participate in the political discourse. Their political figures are imprisoned or did not have enough support to run for president in the elections of 2013.
The paper will discuss the decline of the religious reformist movement in Iran and its reasons. Along political respectively strategic factors for the loss of power, it will focus on the theoretical background of the religious reformists in Iran and take a closer look on the philosophical work of religious reformist thinkers, mainly Abdolkarim Soroush, Mohamad Mojtahed Shabestari, Mohsen Kadivar and Hasan Yusefi Eshkevari. The paper will zoom in to the Human Rights and democracy discourse of these thinkers, where they discuss whether a certain interpretation of Islam is compatible with Human Rights and democracy.
The paper will argued that argumentative and structural weaknesses in the work of these religious reformist thinkers are directly linked to political setbacks for the reformist movement.