Mohammad Rasekh; Fatemeh Bakhshizadeh
Abstract
More than a century ago, a great revolution occurred in Iran, the fundamental aim of which was to establish a rule of law system. Accordingly, the concept of law has been one of the most essential though challenging concepts of the constitutionalist movement in the country. This issue is so significant ...
Read More
More than a century ago, a great revolution occurred in Iran, the fundamental aim of which was to establish a rule of law system. Accordingly, the concept of law has been one of the most essential though challenging concepts of the constitutionalist movement in the country. This issue is so significant that we may seek the root of the Iranian constitutional crisis in the failure of providing a clear and workable concept of law. A serious impediment in this regard was the old concept and system of Shar`, which prima facie left no room for law. Shari`atist thinkers took two approaches to the relationship between law and Shar`: compatibility and incompatibility. Not only did the compatibility approach believe in the possibility of combination and sometimes identity of Shar`i and legal rules, it finally gave the upper hand to law and its requirements. One of the fundamental disputes related to the legislating authority. Shari`atists ultimately embraced legislation by the human being. Nevertheless, this brought about controversies and debates on the last prophet-hoodness of Muhammad (pbuh), religious innovation, and rational preference. This paper shall analyse the concept of law from the perspective of Shari`atist thinkers living during the Iranian Constitutional Revolution era, on the basis of their works and the related documents. This analysis will lay the historical and theoretical ground for the similar and still unresolved problem under the legal system established after the Islamic Revolution in the Country.
Mohammad Rasekh; Fatemeh Bakhshi Zade
Abstract
Emergence of the concept of law in the Constitutional era should be considered as the result of intellectual endeavours of those thinkers who had striven to explain it long before the official date of the Constitutional Revolution (1906). Therefore, learning about intellectual and objective backgrounds ...
Read More
Emergence of the concept of law in the Constitutional era should be considered as the result of intellectual endeavours of those thinkers who had striven to explain it long before the official date of the Constitutional Revolution (1906). Therefore, learning about intellectual and objective backgrounds and also about the first discussions and analyses on the nature of law will bear great insights. This paper shall deal with the development of idea of change in the political system in the pre-Constitutional time up to the Constitutional Revolution. This in fact reveals the process of emergence and evolution of the concept of law among the thinker or that era. It was not an accident that people sought a constitutional system and laws appropriate to this system. The existence of an unregulated (independent) absolute monarchy accompanied with an absolute law and then introduction of the idea of a regulated absolute monarchy along with the law as regulations were all background elements that contributed to the rise of a will for a constitutional system which in turn had occupied the mind of the main constitutional thinkers. Law for them was the law of a constitutional system. This understanding went serious changes later on.
