The inability of traditional Shi’a jurisprudents to respond to the challenges in the field of human rights and the rights of religious minorities, which is rooted in the denial of human dignity and the emphasis on religious dignity, has led to the emergence of a new discourse among contemporary Shi’a jurisprudents in Iran in recent years. This group of jurists known as reformist jurists seeks to re-evaluate the jurisprudential laws, re-interpret the Shari’a and find a way out of the religion to reduce the existing conflict with the universal human rights standards. The opinions of this group of jurists, albeit criticized by the traditional scholars, have been welcomed by young clerics. To understand the main aspects of this jurisprudential dispute, two main questions have been considered by the researchers: What are the main principles of human rights in the thoughts of traditionalist and reformist jurists in Iran? And how differently have the reformist jurists conceptualized the subject of human rights? To answer these questions, the impact of traditional jurisprudents on the formulation of the current constitution of Iran is studied and the main differences between the views of traditional and modern jurists are evaluated.

The common method of the traditional Islamic Jurisprudence in seminaries has been challenged by Ayatollah Yousef Saanei, one of the ten prominent Iranian Grand Ayatollahs. Saanei is well known for attempting to institutionalize a new method of Ijtihad, known as searching Ijtihad, which seeks to reconsider the common mode of understanding religious texts and jurisprudential inferences. His experiences of observing the systematic ineffectiveness and discrimination in popular jurisprudence regarding women’s rights, family, and religious minorities persuaded him to take scientific action in revising the common jurisprudential method. In the present paper, the necessity of revising the common jurisprudential approach in seminaries from Saanei’s point of view is firstly studied. Afterwards, the foundations, principles, and methods of modern Saanei’s Ijtihad will be investigated to determine the structure and foundations of his jurisprudential method and evaluate its impact on resolving the contradictions between traditional perceptions of religion and human rights.

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Although Christian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian minorities form less than two per cent of the Iranian population, the recognition of their official rights and the institutionalised legal discrimination against them has been a matter of a long conflict between minority rights activists and Muslim jurists since the Constitutional Revolution in 1905. The major part of this controversy relates to the assumed status of non-Muslims in traditional Shi’a jurisprudence. The present study examines and assesses the recognised status and rights of religious minorities in the two constitutions of 1906 and 1979 and their development. Although, due to the formation of new recitations in Shi’a jurisprudence, some changes have been made in identifying the fundamental rights of religious minorities, the domination of the general spirit of the rulings in Shi’a jurisprudence in the formulation of both constitutions means there is still a long way to go before recognising equal human rights for all.