It is estimated that 1 per cent of the Iranian population is non-Muslim and 30 per cent non-Shiite. The rest have been Shiites since the Safavid dynasty (1501–1722). Isfahan, the city in which I was born, is one of the main places in which Zoroastrians, Jews, Christians, and Sunni Muslims have lived. My desire to help their dialogues emerge developed when I was studying in high school. My motivation was strengthened twenty years later when I translated The Imitation of Christ, the classic Christian ethical work by Thomas à Kempis (d.1471), in 2002 in Tehran. As Kempis’s book contains global ethical-mystical teachings that are similar to the Islamic ones, the Persian translation is enthusiastically welcomed by all Iranians and provides an opportunity to help advance the dialogue. On the other hand, the experience of learning and teaching legal theory and jurisprudence in the Seminary of Qum (Ḥawza) between 1982 and 1997 led me to the conclusion that the main obstacle standing in way of expanding the dialogue and improving the coexistence of the followers of different faiths lies in some rulings held by Shiite jurists whose legacy has gradually taken shape in history. These fiqhī opinions, which by the end of the nineteenth century were circulating among ordinary people, clergymen, and the elite, are claimed to be based on scripture and hence the jurists look upon them as the prevailing Islamic rulings. Consequently, the global ethical Islamic teachings that must have affected our lives and better prepared the ground for coexistence, lost their effectiveness in Muslim contexts because of the pressure of the fiqhī legal climate. In this work, which is a partial history of Iranian laws between 1906 and 2020, I demonstrate that the main obstacles standing in the way of improving the legal status of non-Muslims in Muslim contexts are fiqhī opinions, which are mistakenly regarded as integral to the Islamic faith. I aim to clarify how Islamic Shiite rulings on the legal status of non-Muslims came to be codified in Iranian laws.
The last point is that I tried to evaluate all aspects of the status of non-Muslims in their respective contexts. Thus, unlike some Muslim authors who try to highlight some political and ethical aspects of the issue in Islamic sources and societies and to deny or ignore the contrary legal aspects, I intend to examine the rights and duties of non-Muslims as they are described in the Islamic sources to identify the main obstacles in respecting them as citizens and in observing their rights. It is worth noting that this intention in no way affects the impartiality of my observations.