ABSTRACT
This chapter explains how religious intellectuals in Iran in the 1990s advanced two projects simultaneously. The first one was the project of indigenizing (boomi-sazi) modern principles in Iran. In this project, the efforts focused on injecting the general, universal, and modern principles into the structures of traditional society. The social and political modernists are encountering numerous problems both in establishing modern concepts such as freedom and the rule of law, and in forming civil society. By reconciling incompatible traditional concepts with these modern concepts, the religious intellectuals are helping the social and political modernists to strengthen their project. A change in the sociopolitical structure cannot happen without a transformation in the epistemological structure of Iranian society; and this transformation cannot happen without intellectuals.
