In today’s hyper-connected world, where sources are readily accessible, outright falsehoods rarely survive for long. Yet this has hardly eliminated deceptive framing and tendentious spin. While “narrative construction” (weaving events together to steer the audience toward a preconceived conclusion) and “framing” (casting an issue in a particular light to alter its meaning) are staples of political journalism, they are just as active across cultural and intellectual discourse.
A telling example can be found in certain eulogies and retrospectives penned for religious scholars. Honoring figures to whom the academic and seminary communities owe an immense debt is unquestionably commendable. At times, however, beneath the veneer of appreciation lie revisionist narratives and inverted caricatures.
Take, for instance, a recent obituary for the late Grand Ayatollah Shubayri Zanjani. In it, his embrace of the “insidād” doctrine (the epistemic closure of direct, certain access to divine law) was framed as though it championed cognitive skepticism, an open embrace of potentially all modern secular norms, and an epistemological modesty aimed at banishing “dogmatism.” The author went so far as to portray him as someone who—owing to his mastery of manuscript variants—abandoned strict scriptural textualism in favor of contemporary conventions and human reason, and who was therefore “anti-takfiri.” The tacit premise, of course, was that anyone who refuses to subordinate canonical texts to Western modern norms must inherently be an extremist or a takfiri.
Yet anyone even casually acquainted with Ayatollah Shubayri Zanjani’s methodology and juristic practice will instantly recognize the subtle distortion and intellectual sleight of hand at work. For him—as for any Shiʿi legal theorist (uṣūlī)—the doctrine of insidād never meant an epistemological impasse or utter agnosticism, which would undermine the finality and completeness of divine revelation. Nor did it open the floodgates to pure conjecture, arbitrary guesswork, or subjective juristic preference (istiḥsān) when discerning the licit and illicit. Rather, insidād addresses a highly technical epistemic problem regarding the probative force (ḥujjiyya) of a certain set of religious evidence, and its scope remains strictly confined to some rulings—never the bedrock axioms and settled essentials of Islamic law.
Similarly, his attentiveness to custom (ʿurf) and reasonable conventions (sīrat al-ʿuqalāʾ) was never meant to dilute fidelity to scriptural proof. Instead, it was an exercise in methodological rigor. In traditional seminary jurisprudence, certain interpretive canons and rational maxims -either the hermeneutical or the ones governing contracts and transactions- are often treated as axiomatic dogma. Ayatollah Zanjani, by scrutinizing the rational and customary origins of these interpretive tools, cautioned his students against applying them mechanically. He insisted that with every application, one must examine the original rationale behind the rule to ensure it genuinely fits the case at hand. How could anyone conflate this nuanced hermeneutic discipline with “jettisoning the text for the sake of modern custom”?
In fact, he was known to view some of the rigid, late-scholastic seminary formulas as an obstacle to genuine understanding. He advocated returning to the primary texts in their historical, linguistic context, prior to the crystallization of late technical seminary jargon. This made him especially wary of extraneous disciplines; he famously warned that an uncritical, superficial immersion in philosophical studies could distort an intuitive, text-grounded reading of jurisprudence.
Like any discerning jurist, Ayatollah Zanjani was acutely vigilant against modern intellectual fads and cultural defeatism in legal scholarship—attitudes that readily sacrifice the historical continuity and internal integrity of the discipline of Islamic jurisprudence to an imagined and propagandized chasm between “tradition” and “modernity.” When confronting such conceptual aberrations, he typically leveled two critiques: calling them either “not straight” (an epistemological deviation from the core methodology of the discipline) or “poor taste” (an intuitive disconnect from the historical orthodoxy of the school).
How, then, can one portray a jurist of such uncompromising rigor—so sensitive to the slightest methodological skew—as a patron of an approach that throws the doors of legal reasoning wide open to conjecture and modern arbitrary norms? If such distorted framing is not deliberate intellectual score-settling, it is, at best, born of a profound failure to comprehend his true scholarly stature; may God be pleased with him.
