- In the documentary film “What Comes From Sitting in Silence,” director Sophie Schrago “is a fly on the wall” during sessions in a “women’s Islamic-law court” in India, headed by a woman judge.
- “After days of deliberation, [Iran‘s] powerful Assembly of Experts has chosen Ayatollah Seyyed Mojtaba Hosseini Khamenei as the third Supreme Leader,” with Iranian media describing him as a “scholar well-versed in Islamic law and theology.” “The death of the previous leader, Mojtaba’s father, in “February 2026 US–Israeli airstrikes on Tehran has…revived a question that has long shadowed the system since its founding: whether supreme authority rests primarily on religious legitimacy or political power.”
- Nura Hossainzadeh argued that former Supreme Leader of Iran Ruhollah Khomeini‘s “vast corpus of writings and statements” demonstrate that “he was often, put simply, a democrat…[who] insisted that the legitimacy of Islamic government rested upon the popular referendum.”
- The Business Standard offered a “closer look at the concept of being an Ayatollah and how Iran has overlapped its political system with the Shia clerical hierarchy.”
- In a recent statement, Dr. Raghib Naeemi of Pakistan‘s Council of Islamic Ideology outlined the “fundamental difference” between “zakat and voluntary charity (sadaqa).”