فصلنامه راهبرد فرهنگ
پیاپی 36 (زمستان 1395)

With an increase in the social aspect of human life and diversity and plurality of different social systems, planning and policymaking for human societies become more complex. Macro approach, comprehensiveness and process approach to decision-making and policymaking are among the preconditions for the success of management systems. The Shia jurisprudence, as an effective management system, which covers all individual and social aspects of human life, is not an exception. System approach to inference of jurisprudential decrees and rules means that the “duty of the other duty-bound people” and the “other duties of the duty-bound people” should be studied together in the system of jurisprudential decrees. It is also necessary to correctly depict the process of transformation of “beliefs” to “ought tos” so that the jurisprudential decrees are not incompatible with the objectives and principles of jurisprudence and purposes of the legislator. Hence, in the first place, the objective and fundamentals must be precisely studied in the philosophy of jurisprudence and then the doctrines and general policies of the legislator are correctly extracted and their practical domains are determined. Finally, decisions should be made and policies formulated based on a suitable structure and systematization of rules and doctrines as well as determining their proper place in each domain. Attempts have been made in this research to offer five procedures for extraction of Sharia doctrines and also offer some jurisprudential mechanisms for balancing and safeguarding the system.

With an increase in the social aspect of human life and diversity and plurality of different social systems, planning and policymaking for human societies become more complex. Macro approach, comprehensiveness and process approach to decision-making and policymaking are among the preconditions for the success of management systems. The Shia jurisprudence, as an effective management system, which covers all individual and social aspects of human life, is not an exception. System approach to inference of jurisprudential decrees and rules means that the “duty of the other duty-bound people” and the “other duties of the duty-bound people” should be studied together in the system of jurisprudential decrees. It is also necessary to correctly depict the process of transformation of “beliefs” to “ought tos” so that the jurisprudential decrees are not incompatible with the objectives and principles of jurisprudence and purposes of the legislator. Hence, in the first place, the objective and fundamentals must be precisely studied in the philosophy of jurisprudence and then the doctrines and general policies of the legislator are correctly extracted and their practical domains are determined. Finally, decisions should be made and policies formulated based on a suitable structure and systematization of rules and doctrines as well as determining their proper place in each domain. Attempts have been made in this research to offer five procedures for extraction of Sharia doctrines and also offer some jurisprudential mechanisms for balancing and safeguarding the system.

Martyr Seyed Mohammd Baqer Sadr may be considered the architect of a new approach in jurisprudential studies, whose main focus is inferring social systems from religious sources. In this approach, jurisprudential issues and problems are not studied as separate islands – as it is done in the current jurisprudential studies – rather it is considered as a completed system, whose components are just like an integrated network. Inference of the system as a complex and totality, which requires a new chapter in jurisprudential studies, is different from inference of a decree for every single component of the system through decrees of general subjects.
The present article, in the first part, has discussed the viewpoint of Shahid Sadr about jurisprudence of systems and its principal aspects. In the second part, focusing on the features of jurisprudence of systems, the differences of jurisprudence of systems from the existing jurisprudence are explained from various aspects. Based on the jurisprudence of systems, another type of duties and obligations are conceived, which are somehow different from the decree in individual jurisprudence in certain dimensions. These two types of duties are distinguished from the prevailing jurisprudential decrees with regard to their subject, the duty-bound person, type of duty, reward and punishment and method of inference.

The Isfahan Jurisprudential School of Thought, which was first established by the religious scholars who had migrated from Jabal Amel and then continued its activities with the assistance of Iranian religious scholars of the Safavid era, has been one of the most successful and effective Shia jurisprudential schools of thought. There are two major trends in this school, i.e. Usouli and Akhbari. Each of these schools, while having some commonalities, have had their own specific approaches to politics. Undoubtedly, the maximal and open involvement of jurisprudence in the core of political power during the Safavid period provided a significant capital for the ensuing political systems in Iran, including the Islamic Republic. This is what adds to the significance of political jurisprudence during the Safavid era. The particular conditions of Shias during this period (their first time involvement in the political power after being on the margin for a long time in the history), the confrontation between Iran and the Ottoman Empire as well as Iran’s diplomacy towards Europe are the three fundamental political subjects the Isfahan School of Thought focused on and along with the internal developments of the Shia jurisprudence are discussed in this paper. The relationship between jurisprudence and politics (not necessarily political jurisprudence) during the Safavid era is studied in this research through second level epistemological approach.

The main questions of the present paper are: Is there any essential capacity in Islamic jurisprudence for system building? What would be the nature of such a system if jurisprudence is capable of building it? A comprehensive understanding of different aspects and dimensions of the phenomena and true, abstract and real subjects is one of the significant requirements of system building. Although in the course of its history, jurisprudence has not fully utilized this understanding, through delving into its concessive origins and the crucial fundamentals existing in its epistemological geometry, one can enumerate some processes and cases which are applicable in the process of system building, moving this discipline from the isolated domain of individual and socially limited concepts and statements to give social domain a proper place in this discipline. Ayatollah Seyed Mohammad Baqir Sadr is among scholars who was aware of this capacity of jurisprudence and hence offered some mechanisms as an evolutionary version in the process of classic individual inference (ijtihad), some of whose aspects are discussed in this paper.