10th December 2025
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The Principles of Islamic Jurisprudence

This course offers a comprehensive study of the principles of jurisprudence, a foundational discipline for all Islamic narrative sciences. Students examine four main areas: Language and Meaning, addressing textual interpretation; Rational Correlations, exploring the role of reason in deriving rulings; Authority, assessing valid sources of law and their evidentiary weight; and Procedural Principles, guiding legal reasoning lacking clear proof. The course combines close reading of a major original text—Arabic proficiency required—and analysis of modern English-language scholarship. Emphasis is placed on historical development, theoretical foundations, and comparative perspectives.

 Religion and Science

The course discusses the relationship between religion and science from four perspectives: religion and ‘the history’ of science, religion and ‘the method’ of science, religion and the ‘theories’ of science, and ‘philosophical and theological’ reflections. Although it explores the relationship between religion and natural sciences in general, the focus sciences are four in addition to their metaphysical/theological implications: biology (Darwinism and evolutionary theory, natural theology, and randomness), physics (quantum theory and relativity), astronomy (the Big Bang, creation, design, and chance), and cognitive psychology & neuroscience (perception, and brain mechanisms).

Memorial of Fraidoon Hovaizi

Death reminds us of the path that awaits every one of us; it is the inseparable counterpart of life. Each human being passes through four stages of existence: the fetal realm, earthly life, the world of the grave, and the Resurrection. Dr. Fraidoon Hovaizi—an economist and an Iranian Arab from Khuzestan—played a singular and enduring role in the Muslim community of Charlottesville. He offered valuable counsel and support to Arab, Iranian, and Afghan immigrants alike. He lived with joy, and he departed this world with the same serenity.

Professor Nasr: A Tribute and a Reflection

Professor Seyyed Hossein Nasr is among the most influential interpreters of Islam in the Western academy. Through dozens of books and hundreds of scholarly articles and lectures, he has conveyed a compelling, compassionate, and intellectually vibrant vision of Islam. I regard Professor Nasr as one of the foremost exponents of “Rahmani Islam”—the Islam of Compassion. Professor Nasr is a source of pride for Iran, Islam, and Shiʿism in the contemporary world. His many virtues far outweigh his few shortcomings—and who among us is free from error?

The Expectations from Islam

This lecture, The Expectations from Islam, examines how reformist Muslims define the scope and limits of religion today. Moving beyond traditional accounts of prophecy’s benefits, it asks what Muslims can legitimately expect from Islam. Reformist thought distinguishes enduring, transhistorical teachings from historically contingent rulings, identifying eight permanent domains: meaning to life, knowledge of God, the Hereafter, the unseen realm, morality, ritual, quasi-ritual, and limited social guidance. While Islam offers lasting principles of meaning, faith, ethics, and salvation, reformists emphasize that secular sciences and human reason address most worldly affairs.

Only a Referendum Could Decide Iran’s Future

The Islamic Republic, once born of popular revolution, has evolved into an authoritarian state under Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei’s long rule, marked by repression, economic decline, and public disillusionment. Over 85% of Iranians oppose current policies, calling for a referendum on the system’s future, with growing support for a secular democratic republic. Despite hostility toward foreign aggression, especially from Israel and the U.S., Iranians reject regime change via external force. Israel’s recent attack on Iran, alongside atrocities in Gaza, underscores global failures of international law, human rights, and ethical governance.

International Conference on Islamic Perspectives on Prophecy and Revelation

The Department of Islamic Philosophy and Theology at the Al-Mahdi Institute in Birmingham, in collaboration with the Department of Religious Studies at Duke University, held an international conference on July 24–25, 2025, at Duke University. Although the event was affected by increasingly restrictive U.S. visa policies under the current U.S. administration, it was successfully held and was received well by the academic community. Organizing a conference on one of the most fundamental Islamic topics at a leading university during this challenging period in the US constitutes a significant achievement.

Islamic Perspectives on Prophecy and Revelation

The conference is crucial for fostering a nuanced understanding of how the ancient concepts of prophecy and revelation can be meaningfully integrated into modern thought and practice, helping to bridge the gap between traditional beliefs and contemporary intellectual concerns in these areas: The Nature and Function of Prophecy and Revelation in Islamic Thought; Prophecy, Revelation, and Epistemology; Prophecy, Revelation, and Philosophy of Language; Prophecy, Revelation, and Philosophy of Religion; Revelation, Unseen World, and Skeptical Theology; Prophecy, Revelation, and Comparative Abrahamic Traditions; and Contemporary Issues and Challenges to Prophecy and Revelation.

Islam and Modernism

Why is the experience of Muslims about modernization and modernity different from Western modernization and modernity? Why do we have modernities (plural), not modernity (singular)? How did modernity divide Muslims into conservative or traditionalists, fundamentalists or revolutionaries, quasi-conservatives, reformists, and revisionists? How does each of these five camps introduce Islam? This course tries to respond to such questions, as the key questions of Islam and modernism. We focus on the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries’ main debates, tensions, responses, and adaptations, and cover the major classics of this period.

Religion and Politics In Post-Revolutionary Iran

This course will narrate a fair and balanced critical and historical analysis, and is organized into five thematic sections: a brief overview of the relationship between religion and politics in Iran, an intellectual history of the Islamic Republic, examining the concept of the “sacred as secular” and exploring the dynamics of secularization within a theocratic system, the governance in the name of Islam, focusing on theology and theocratic rule in the Islamic Republic, and the revolt against theocracy: the Mahsa Movement and the feminist uprising against theocracy in Iran.

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