Between Truth and Democracy: Mostafa Malekian’s Spiritual Intellectualism

Abstract

This chapter deals with Mostafa Malekian’s social and political thought. After an overview of Malekian’s spirituality thesis and his view on the relationship between reason and religion, I discuss his outlook on the social ethos of spiritual citizens in which he lists the virtues that, following from his rationality and spirituality thesis, citizens of a well-ordered democracy would follow. The third part of this chapter focuses on Malekina’s theory of toleration and his particular defense of political secularism. Malekian argues that one of our fundamental moral duties is to seek the truth while another is to follow justice. The latter obliges us to behave tolerantly towards others when the first duty does not apply, i.e. in those cases were a clear and definite (objective in-practice) truth is unavailable. The last part of this chapter includes an evaluation of Malekian’s thesis on the relationship between truth and democracy from the perspective of political liberalism. Drawing on Rawls’s political philosophy, I argue that Malekian’s theory of toleration suffers from a confusion between the demands of acting morally in the public and private spheres.