The effects of liberalism on iranian religious intellectualism: case of Mojtahed Shabestari

After destroying the left party and Marxist regimes in East Europe and Soviet Union in the last decades of 1980, liberalism as the globalized ideology in the world over dominated the dominant ideology in the world. In this regard, Iranian scholars applied liberalism ideology in their views. Religious intellectualism esp. Dr. Abdolkarim Soroush and Mojtahed Shabestari had the most and strongest effects of liberalism on their opinions. In the present study we deal with Mojtahed Shabestari's ideas in the second decade of 1980 in Iran, a decade which it was coincident with the deteriorating Marxist power, the dominated power at that time. The main question is how much Mojtahed Shabestari used liberalism ideology in his views and ideas? Based on overlapping his ideologies with liberalism features the hypothesis of this research shows that he had been influenced a lot by liberalism. We used an analytical methodology to scrutinize the topic well based on documents and books