Modern Shia Islamic and Jewish Political Theosophy: An Elective Affinity?

The present study will focus on core parallels and nodes of theopolitical exchange between the two most politically and theologically consequential jurist "theosophers" of the twentieth century, the Religious Zionist founding father, the Jewish Rav Avraham Yitzchak Hacohen Kook (1865–1935), and the Shia Islamic Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1900–1989). Unquestioned masters of the tradition of both medieval philosophy and mysticism, as well as the theosophies of the early-modern and modern eras, both Kook and Khomeini attempted to embed the rhetoric of theosophy within revolutionary notions of both clerical religious authority and the necessity of their respective nomoi to assume political form. The study will also correlate contemporary Shia reformist theosophies undergirded with anti-theocratic exoteric postures with pre-WW2 German-Jewish "existence philosophies" as represented by Franz Rosenzweig, noting a common appreciation for what the study will term "theopolitical risk". It argues that the retrieval of medieval Judeo-Islamic political philosophy for the successful negotiation of reason and revelation in modernity against both theocratic juridical extremism and the iron cages of positivistic-realist secularism must be rethought in light of the theopolitics coursing through Iran and Israel, two states at the geographic periphery though fully within the horizons of the Modern West. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]