Failure to Engage: On Bennett’s Method, Evasion, and Scholarly Irresponsibility
In On the Retroactive Activation of a Dormant Fatwa , I posed a narrowly framed methodological challenge to Chris Bennett’s recent treatment of a 2014 juristic responsum by the late Ayatollah Muhammad-Sadiq Rohani (d. 2022). The challenge did not concern ideological alignment, personal motives, or polemical positioning. It concerned method. Specifically, it asked why a document that circulated for over a decade without alarm or intervention was suddenly reintroduced in 2025–26 as evidentiary or urgent, and what hermeneutic and institutional conditions made that reactivation possible. Since that challenge was issued, Bennett has not addressed it. This absence is not a matter of tone or temperament. It is a matter of record. Bennett has continued to reiterate conclusions about the document’s insignificance, dubiousness, or alleged irrelevance, but he has not engaged the core methodological question: why now? Nor has he addressed the structural points raised con...
