The discussion on reforms in Islam has been ongoing in the Islamic world for many decades. This trend was also present in Iran, where it gained particular intensity after the Islamic Revolution of 1979. It was religious intellectuals who took the main debate upon themselves. Their activity and efforts concentrated around the problem of the adaptation of Islamic rules to the modern world. One of their proposals was to change the classical method of theological reflection. Although Islamic theology (kalam) during the first centuries of Islam become the queen of all Islamic sciences, contemporary Iranian thinkers are calling for the development of a new paradigm of religious reflection – a new kalam, kalam-e jadid, which would be characterized by rationality, openness to interpretation and criticism and would remain in constant dialogue with the non-religious sciences. The paper is an attempt to reconstruct the main assumptions of Iranian kalam-e jadid based on the views of its most important advocates.
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