Mohsen Kadivar is a Muslim scholar, an Iranian dissident who has been in exile since 2008, and a visiting research professor of Islamic studies at Duke University since 2009.
Born in 1959 in Iran, studied at the Islamic seminary at Qom ending with a certificate of Ijtihad, (highest degree in Islamic religious tradition), he got a Ph.D. of Islamic Philosophy and theology from Tarbiate Modarress University in Tehran.
Kadivar was sentenced by the illegal Special Court for Clergy to 18 months in prison because of his political criticism of the Islamic Republic, and was released in July 2000.
His main intellectual interests and topics of publications include: human rights and democracy in Islam, classical and modern Shi'a theology and legal theories, Shi'a political thought, classical Islamic philosophy, and modern Qur'anic studies. Kadivar published eight books as sole author, and seven more as co-author and editor in Persian and Arabic.
His most recent Persian treatises are Interpellation of leader (May 2011), and Criticism of punishment on apostasy and religious insulting (Feb. 2012). His most recent articles in English are 'Wilayat al-Faqih and Democracy' (Dec. 2011) and 'From Traditional Islam to Islam as an End in Itself' (Dec. 2011).