Editor-in-Chief Lecture
Author
Professor, Department of Sociology, Faculty of Social Affairs, University of Tehran
Abstract
Vol. 15, No. 4 (December 2025)
At a time when social questions in the Muslim world are rapidly moving beyond the level of mere description toward theoretical reconstruction and civilizational strategy, the task of the Journal of Social Theories of Muslim Thinkers is not simply to publish scattered studies. Our responsibility is to sustain a field of scholarly conversation—one in which the ideas of Muslim thinkers are reread, translated into the language of contemporary problems, and critically assessed in relation to the historical experience of Muslim societies, particularly the Iranian experience. The present issue has sought to advance this horizon through several complementary lines of inquiry: civilization and ethics, social theology, state and political economy, justice and language, and crises of identity and interreligious coexistence.
The first cluster of articles revisits civilizational and ethical frameworks, showing that Muslim social theorizing has increasingly moved beyond general moral exhortation toward more analytical approaches to culture, identity, and power. The article “A Constructed Ethical Civilization in the Philosophy of Malik Bennabi and Its Implications” highlights that Bennabi’s civilizational project is not simply a cultural concern; it is directly intertwined with a particular moral ontology and with questions of collective rights, conflict, and peace. In a related vein, “From Male Authority to Female Choice: An Archaeological Study of Discursive Turns in Contemporary Theologies of Hijab” treats hijab not merely as a juridical ruling but as a discursive formation whose meanings have been repeatedly reconfigured through epistemic and social shifts.
A second line of inquiry engages one of the most sensitive questions in contemporary Iranian social theory: the relation between state, economy, and jurisprudential-political foundations. “The Epistemic Foundations of the Extent of State Intervention in the Economy in the 1980s (With a Focus on Imam Khomeini’s Theory of Guardianship of the Jurist)” argues that major disagreements in economic policy were not only administrative responses to pressing conditions; they were also rooted in divergent epistemic and juristic readings of the legitimacy and scope of state intervention. The significance of this contribution lies in placing “economy” within the heart of debates in religious political theory, thereby enabling a more precise conversation between political jurisprudence and public policy.
A third cluster turns to Iranian-Islamic identity and the horizons of utopian imagination. “The Iranian-Islamic Utopia from the Perspective of Abolqasem Ferdowsi of Tus” reminds us that classical literature—especially epic heritage—is not simply an aesthetic archive; it carries forms of social imagination, models of desirable order, and conceptions of justice that can contribute to the reconstruction of indigenous social theory.
A fourth line of inquiry—focused on justice and alienation—takes us to the core of the moral and existential dilemmas faced by contemporary subjects in Muslim societies. “The Speech Act Embedded in Muhammad Reza Hakimi’s Normative Vocabulary on Social Justice” demonstrates how linguistic and discourse-analytic tools can illuminate the normative layers of justice-talk and clarify the relationship between religious language and social-justice claims. Alongside this, two articles on Ali Shariati—one analyzing alienation through idealist and materialist approaches, and another mapping its concepts, causes, and types in Shariati’s works—underscore that alienation in the Muslim world is not merely an imported theoretical construct. It has been reframed through experiences of colonialism, accelerated modernization, and identity and class fractures, and it continues to offer analytical leverage for diagnosing the present.
A fifth axis addresses the crisis of sectarian coexistence and the question of takfīr—an issue with both epistemic roots and far-reaching socio-political consequences. “Islamic Identity under the Constraint of Takfir: A Critical Analysis of the Crisis and a New Horizon for Ecumenical Rapprochement in Light of Shaykh Shaltut’s Thought” asks whether sustainable institutional and intellectual responses can be developed against the logic of exclusion and anathematization.
Although thematically diverse, the contributions converge on a single central point: rereading the intellectual tradition of Muslim thinkers as a source of theory for understanding today’s problems—not in the sense of repeating the past, but by extracting its analytical capacities and testing them against the realities of social life. For this reason, we have sought in this issue to keep visible the link between text and context, between idea and problem, and between history and the present. Without this link, social theory either collapses into descriptively rich but practically inert reportage, or it becomes a hurried form of prescription lacking conceptual depth.
Finally, it is worth noting that the journal is published under an open-access model and the CC BY 4.0 license, reflecting our commitment to the public circulation of knowledge and to the advancement of rigorous, methodologically sound scholarly exchange. We warmly invite researchers to contribute to this shared intellectual space by submitting work that meets the highest standards of academic quality and publication ethics.
Hamid Parsania
Editor-in-Chief
Social Theories of Muslim Thinkers
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