Authors
1
PhD in Religions and Denominations University, Theology major, Quran and Hadith specialization, Faculty of Quran and Hadith, Quranic Sciences Department
2
PhD student, Department of Jurisprudence and Principles, Jurisprudence and Education, Al-Mustafa Al-Alamiyah University (PBUH), Qom, Iran.
10.22034/jqopv.2025.11060
Abstract
The issue of the “place of the people in the Quranic governance model” is one of the most controversial issues in Islamic political thought and one of the fundamental axes of criticism in the Orientalist discourse. Most Orientalists interpret the Quranic political system within the framework of the dual and incompatible opposition of “absolute divine sovereignty” and “human agency” and, accordingly, present it as inherently authoritarian, super-rational, and negating the will of the people. The present study, with a descriptive-analytical approach and at the level of epistemological pathology, examines the intellectual and methodological roots of this perception and shows that the main source of these criticisms lies not in the text of the Quran, but in the paradigmatic and philosophical assumptions of the critics themselves. The findings indicate that the origin of the Orientalists' error is the inability to understand the "longitudinal and non-contradictory structure" between the two pillars of Quranic sovereignty, namely "divine legitimacy" and "human acceptability." As a result, they undermine the conceptual framework of the Quran by imposing the logic of Western dualism on the monotheistic value system. This epistemological damage appears at three levels: first, at the epistemological level, through the confusion between "ideal text" and "historical experience"; second, at the theological-philosophical level, by contrasting God-centeredness and human agency, which leads to a deterministic interpretation of divine sovereignty; and third, at the political-legal level, by equating "legitimacy" and "acceptability" and by unduly generalizing from dubious historical instances to the entire theory. The final conclusion of the research is that many Orientalist judgments are actually a criticism of a "distorted representation of Quranic thought," not of its original revelational theory itself; therefore, a correct understanding of the Quranic model of governance is only possible by returning to the internal logic of the text and freeing oneself from modern Western assumptions.
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