Analyzing the Quality of Representing the concept of Political Legitimacy in the Discourse of Iran's Constitutional Ulama

In the constitutional era, and in the shade of a discursive transition, the attributing relation between the signifiers, signifieds and the referents in the articulatory system of the constitutional Ulama’s discourse was altered and rethought. The constitutional Ulama tried capacity-making and theorizing the new concepts in covering the teachings brought about by the religious texts and the Islamic teachings, found a way for presenting the Urfi subjects (based on human reason and experience) besides the legal bases (based on quote and text). The main question of this research is about the quality of articulating and representing the concept of political legitimacy in these Ulama’s discourse. According to the primary hypothesis, the constitutional Ulama, in the borderline of the modernists and the constitutional Ulama, accepted a kind of political legitimacy based on efficacy and according to this functionalist logic, recognized a government as having legitimacy that in the shade of guarding the holy religion, in two positive and negative aspects, has brought the most security, welfare and common good for the Islamic society. This subject, and during the constitutional era’s evolutions, had effects on the activity process of these Ulama; and, in its procedure provided a base for generating the idea of religious democracy in the Islamic Revolution process and the Islamic Republic era, in the shade of the basic principle of the “people’s right”. The theoretical and methodological framework of this article is based on Van Leeuwen’s Representation theory which has been reinforced with some elements of the social constructionism theory.