TEHRAN, Iran — A group of students in Iran and the United States has launched an initiative — with apparent backing from conservative Iranian lawmakers — to evaluate the originality of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s doctoral thesis. Rouhani submitted his thesis, titled “The Flexibility of Sharia With Reference to the Iranian Experience,” to Glasgow Caledonian University in 1998.
In 2013, following Rouhani’s election as president, a London-based Iranian writer claimed that parts of the thesis had been copied from a book by Afghan academic Mohammad Hashim Kamali.
