The history of Iranian contemporary Shia political theory might be narrated as the perpetual reproduction of a ‘binary’ concerning the relation between theocentric and people-centric authority. The binary has always significations to practical politics, whether civil society (clerical quietism and pro-activism in politics) or government (the relation between sharia and positive law, between theocratic and democratic governance, etc.). What does such binary originate from and what significations have it for the conceptualization of political order? The paper hypothesizes that it returns to ‘the contending jurisprudential conceptions of the political domain of religion’, so-called minimalism vs. maximalism, and in a deeper layer, on ‘the relation between sharia and reason /custom in politics’. To explain, the paper focuses on two political jurisprudential discourses in contemporary Iran; Islamic constitutionalism and the Islamic republic. Despite some similarities (like theological foundations of political sovereignty and the problematic of tradition-modernity relation), there are considerable differences between the two discourses in terms of the ‘political domain of religion’ which leads to different outcomes in theory (the foundation of political sovereignty and legitimacy in the post- ghayba era [occultation of the twelfth Imam]) and practice (the political status of clerics and people in Islamic modern state). Built on an intra-jurisprudential comparative framework, the paper investigates the ‘sharia-reason’ binary in the two contemporary political jurisprudences. To conclude, the paper seeks to highlight the impact of ‘jurisprudential conceptualizations of the sharia- custom relations’ on ‘the form of governance’ in a typical religious society that deals with the problematic of modernity.
