The Reason for Abdu-Razzaq Mesri and Imam Khomeini's Different Views on the Relationship between Religion and Politics

Ali Abdu-Razzaq Mesri and Imam Khomeini are among the inquirers of the most basic discussion in the political thought, i.e. the relationship between religion and politics. While Abdu-Razzaq tries to derive secularism from religious texts, Imam Khomeini, in contrast, proves the theory of equality of religion and politics. The importance of studying the views of these two thinkers lies in their departing from the contemporary dominant paradigm and their intellectual authority for the proponents and opponents of secularism in the Islamic world. The contention between the proponents of the Abdu-Razzaq's and Imam Khomeini's intellectual traditions, which is nowadays found in visible and invisible layers of scientific circles in the Islamic world, explains the necessity of studying the thoughts of these two thinkers. What is problematic here is not the duality of their thinking but the reason for this duality; that is both Abdu-Razzaq and Imam Khomeini emerged from the traditional clerics of their own age, using religious text to prove their theories; however, they came to different results on a single subject. Therefore, the present study poses the following question: why have Abdu-Razzaq and Imam Khomeini, though religiously educated, come to a theoretical conflict on the relationship between religion and politics from an intra-religious position? Providing an answer this question can seriously influence the contention between Muslim secularists and the proponents of equality of religion and politics, and would answer one of the current questions in the Islamic political thought. One hypothesis for this is the conflict and inconsistency among the religious texts, which is an invalid hypothesis in the author's view, as it displays a shallow reading of the Quranic verses and a severe scientific weakness. The hypothesis of the present study, however, is that the reason for theoretical conflict between Abdu-Razzaq and Imam Khomeini on the relationship of religion and politics lies in the difference between their discourses. The research method here is a comparative-critical one.