Human Rights and Reformist Islam

Mohsen Kadivar is Research Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Duke University. One of the most original and prolific figures of the Iranian reform movement, he is a versatile theologian, philosopher and intellectual historian who has written ground-breaking books on human rights and Islam, Islamic political thought, and Islamic philosophy and theology. His forthcoming 'Islamic Theocracy in the Secular Age' will be published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2021. Kadivar has been a vocal critic of Iran's doctrine of clerical rule and a strong advocate of democratic and liberal reforms in Iran as well as constructional reform in shari'a and Shi'a theology. He has served time in prison in Iran for his political activism and beliefs; his writings have been banned in Iran since 2009. Mirjam Kuenkler is Research Professor at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study. Her books include Female Religious Authority in Shi?i Islam: Past and Present, Edinburgh University Press, 2021; A Secular Age Beyond the West, Cambridge University Press, 2018; Democracy and Islam in Indonesia, Columbia University Press, 2013; and the forthcoming The Rule of Law in the Islamic Republic of Iran: Power, Institutions, and Prospects for Reform, Cambridge University Press, among others. She is a PI of the Iran Data Portal, co-editor of the Cambridge Journal of Law and Religion, co-editor of the Brill Research Perspectives in Religion and Politics, and a member of the editorial boards of the International Journal of Islam in Asia (Brill), the Digest of Middle East Studies (Wiley), the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion (Wiley), and Iranian Studies (Cambridge). In 2023, Kuenkler was elected President of the Association for the Study of Persianate Societies (ASPS). Niki Akhavan is Associate Professor and Chair, Department of Media and Communication Studies at The Catholic University of America and author of Electronic Iran (Rutgers University Press, 2013). She has been a Persian-English translator for over 20 years.