نشریه علوم سیاسی
سال دوازدهم شماره 3 (پیاپی 47، پاییز 1388)

Political requirement is a basic concept in political literature and in Islamic political thought and in most texts it is dealt with under political legitimacy. The main questions of the paper are: what is political requirement, what or who grants the right to rule to rulers, and why should the members of the government follow the requirements of the ruler? Political Fiqh answers the question on the basis of traditions of texts, but political philosophy on the basis of a rational approach. This paper approaches political requirement according to political philosophy and analyzes the related theories.

The present paper is a study of the literal and terminological meanings of Fiqh [jurisprudence] and representation, and the nature of representation on the basis of the Quran, traditions, and jurisprudents. The paper, then, deals with the basics and conditions of representation. In addition, it analyzes the conditions of qualified electors, including maturity and rationality, and the conditions of representatives, including maturity, rationality, and free will of choice. Finally, the paper elaborates on the commitments of representatives and whether representation brings about commitment or not.

Political parties and groups have an important status in democratic systems. After three decades of post-revolutionary vicissitudes, studying the role of political parties in the Islamic Republic of Iran seems necessary. This paper studies the role and functions of parties under four periods of party anarchism, of passiveness and limitation, of regularity and stabilization, and of flourishing and thought-making and proposes an analysis of their role in politics.

The constituents of political rights guarantee the security and freedom of individuals against the general power and other individuals. These rights, i.e. freedom of opinion and speech, freedom of communities and groups, and election of rulers through a free election, are prerogatives which make it possible for an individual to prepare the grounds for his/her prosperity through freedom of choice. These rights are supported domestically by the constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Islamic penal law, and other law, and internationally by documents such as universal declaration of human rights, Islamic declaration of human rights, and international civil rights treaty. This paper is to study the constituents of individual political rights and their implementation according to domestic and international laws.

The stability of any political system and any social phenomenon depends on its constituents. The Iranian political system, too, enjoys a structure and some institutions which guarantee its stability. Thus, the present paper is to make a short comparison of the structure of Islamic government and that of the Western democracies to show that on the basis of what structure the Iranian political system could stand against new global systems and even as notable power in the realm of politics draw attentions to itself.

Abo-al-Hassan Masoudi witnessed socio-political turmoil, early replacements of Islamic caliphs, policies againt wisdom and Islamic law, irreligious behaviors in his time. The type of researches he did about the rise and fall of societies, governments, and Indian, Chinese, and Iranian civilizations shows that he had political orientations in his historiography, especially in his book Morawwej al-Zahab. In other words, he did a pathological study of Islamic caliphs and evaluated both the factors of the strength and authority of efficient caliphs and the defects of the authority of these caliphs espacially those of the second period of the Abbasid caliphs. To him these defects are deviation from the path of religion, wise politics, and justice.

Analyzing political discourse is to elaborate on specific communicative events and construction and transformation of political discourse order. The main purpose of the paper is to propose an analytical framework which makes it possible to inquire into the contemporary political discourse order. This framework is in fact a specific version of critical discourse analysis. To analyze individual discursive texts and events, one should place them in their wider socio-political contexts to achieve a more general conception of discourse and social order. Thus, one has to rely on a combination of one's cultural knowledge and written expressions of political discourse. The example which comes at the end of the paper shows some of potentialities of the framework.