Provides a preliminary theoretical framework for understanding the religious intellectuals’ writings as political acts and interventions. It draws on the work of Quentin Skinner in the history of political thought, which attempts to explicate how authorial intentionality can be seen as embedded in texts. It also employs the insights of Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, and Antonio Gramsci in order to delineate the religious intellectuals and other relevant socio-political actors as a semi-institutionalised and routinised network and dispositif whose nodal points possess varying degrees of social capital and hegemony within political, cultural, and intellectual fields. It is by means of this network that religious intellectuals in concert with elements of the Islamic left sought to establish moral and ideological leadership within the context of intra-elite factional struggles. Bourdieu’s notions of social capital, field, and symbolic power are particularly relevant if we are to make a case with respect to the religious intellectuals’ relationship to the manifold institutions which comprise the 'regime' of the Islamic Republic, both institutionally and ideologically, and the numerous groups and political tendencies within the post-revolutionary political elite.