A Critical Studu of the Position of Enjoing the Good and Forbidding the Evil in Shi‛i Jurisprudential Sources

The obligation such as ‘enjoining the good and forbidding the evil’ in the Islamic value system is of significant status and can be operative in different individual, social, and political levels to the extent that this obligation has been taken to be a basis of other Islamic obligations.Naturally, as this obligation is of a sublime position, it requires that the Islamic society pay considerable attention to it and the Muslim jurists deal with it in their works of jurisprudence whereas this significant obligation, in its various levels, has not achieved special status and researches into the sources of jurisprudence show some evidence to the contrary.Having studied the different cycles of jurisprudence, one finds out that the present works of jurisprudence have not been formulated in line with the high status of this obligation and been neglected in scientific texts. Moreover, concerning what causes enjoining the good and forbidding the evil to be outmoded, it is also found out when there is no pure Islamic government, the pressures of the governments, lack of social effort by Muslims, difficulty in recognizing what may be an instance of enjoining the good and forbidding the evil and the right prformance of this duty and other ambiguities in it cause the Muslim jurisprudents do not deal with this issue as they should.