Introduction

The introductory chapter mainly aims to elaborate both historiographical and philosophical approaches of the study. It develops an appropriate method for the historiography of ideas by taking into consideration cultural, linguistic, and sociopolitical limitations and obstacles to free thinking in closed societies. This method is grounded in a hermeneutical interpretation of Collingwood’s logic of question and answer. The chapter also challenges previous studies which employed Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between positive and negative freedom as two fundamentally different concepts of freedom to claim that Muslim thinkers could only understand positive freedom of an agent that highlights ‘the presence of control on the part of the agent’, rather than ‘the absence of obstacles external to the agent’. For this purpose, in its philosophical approach, this study replaces Berlin’s dichotomy of positive and negative liberties with Gerard MacCallum’s triadic concept of freedom, in which freedom is always of something (an agent or agents), from something (conditions such as constraints, restrictions, interferences, or barriers), to do, not do, become, or not become something (actions or conditions of character or circumstance). Then it argues that the late Qajar thinkers could noticeably present rival interpretations of three variables of the concept of freedom, namely the agent, the constraint, and the purpose of freedom. Using this methodological framework, the research questions are formulated in the introductory chapter.