فصلنامه اقتصاد اسلامی
پیاپی 57 (بهار 1394)

Islam’s economic doctrine is a branch of Islamic economics science. Two of the preliminary important topics in this branch of Islamic economics science are its definition and methodology. The present article explicates and examines the definition and methodology of discovering the doctrine in the viewpoint of Martyr Sadr. The results are as following: a. Islam’s economic doctrine consists of some fixed rules being the infrastructure of Fiqh and economic ethics, being inferred from the sources (Quranic verses, hadiths, and reason), and having been established for adjusting the economic relations in the three spheres of production, distribution, and consumption in order for the problems to be solved and the economic goals to be achieved;b. There are three reliable methods for discovering the economic doctrine:1. Discovering the doctrinal principles as the infrastructure, via Enniargumentation, from a Mojtahed’s inferred ethical and jurisprudential verdicts as the superstructure;2. Inferring the doctrinal principles as the superstructure, viaLemmi argumentation, from the ontological teachings as the infrastructure; and3. Adducing the texts which directly specify a principle.

Good governance is a new theory that tries to create institutions which would help the government carry out its responsibilities in providing the public with better conditions and enhanced prosperity. The main objective of this research is to design a good governance model on the basis of Malik-Ashtar letter, using grounded theory method and comparing the results with the World Bank's good governance principles. The research method adopted here is the descriptiveanalytical one, and in order to extract the good governance principles from Malik-Ashtar letter, we have used the grounded theory approach. The results show that although there are some common elements between Imam Ali’s view on good governance and the world bank’s relevant theory, and both of them consider a same truth about the subject, but, due to the structural time differences, the methods adopted in the two periods are different with each other. Furthermore, Imam Ali (a.s.) has paid attention to some such facts as piety and devotion which the World Bank has not, and besides that, Imam Ali (a.s.), in the Letter, introduces Holy Quran and Prophet Mohammad’s tradition as two firm sources of religion in order for the problems to be solved - sources which the world bank doesn’t exploit, as its governing commands are taken from human reason and in the course of time will be variable and unreliable.

Efficiency, fairness, equality and justice have been the most important economic, social, political and cultural terms that have engaged societies and civilizations’ thought till now. Each community's understanding of these concepts will have significant effects on labor, commodity and service markets, income distribution and community’s expectations from the government. Using laboratory observations and via behavioral games, this study has tried to survey the distributive decisions - equality or fairness based - of a 108-member sample of the target society (students of university of Mazandaran). It has also investigated the effect of games’ features on the individuals’ choice of income distribution. The results indicate that group interest raises collusion for increasing the individual’s takeover from the joint account, and that being not interested makes one more inclined to using entitlement and efficiency as the basis of distributive decision. The distribution function in the participants’ view is a one with positive y-intercept. Furthermore, one’s received income increases as one gets more entitled. The ratio between this relationship’s two parties, however, is not 1. Sense of altruism is found in the second common decision, while it is less prevalent in the first one. One’s feeling of his or her rights having been violated in the past unfair decisions makes one more likely to make unfair decisions in the future.

The jurisprudent, mystic, philosopher, and morality master, Ayatollah Mohammadali Shahabadi used to pay great attention to the social and economic problems of his time. Closely examining the economic conditions of the time, he showed that the major cause underpinning economic problems is the prevalence of eastern and western economic systems in Iran and the other Muslim countries. He, thus, has inferred and designed a comprehensive economic model different from eastern and western ones on the basis of Islamic ontological and value foundations. In his economic model, he suggests an administrative model under the surveillance of Muslim governor and Vali-e Faqih which enjoys its special financial, monetary and capital institutions and is different from the conventional economic institutions of his time. Using the method of text interpretation and analysis, the present article tries to introduce Ayatollah Shahabadi’s preferred economic model and indicate that, in his viewpoint, the major solution in order for the Islamic society to get out of economic difficulties is inferring and designing the economic model using formation (Takwin) and innovation (Ibda) method.

Given the importance of money institution in the conventional economy and its implications in issuing the jurisprudential verdicts, understanding its nature has always been one of the concerns of Islamic economists. Ontology of money’s literature (in West) mainly incorporates debates between the two approaches we call “commodity theory” and “credit theory” of money on its nature, value and central function. Defining money as a commodity like the others with some differences, and basing its value on its commodity value, the commodity theory emphasizes on “exchange medium” as money’s main function. The credit theory, on the other hand, describes money as “an abstract representative of value”, “a promise to pay”, and “a claim upon society”, whose value is based upon social relations, and insists on its role as a “value computing unit.” There are also some theories about money nature in Islamic economics studies, which have some advantages and disadvantages as well. Some of these disadvantages are similar to those of the commodity and credit theories. Emphasizing on the credit aspect of money, and claiming that the commodity theory isn’t capable enough to explicate money and that the definitions used by the credit theorists suffer from ambiguity, we separate two levels of understanding money, define money in the essential sense as an “abstract measure of value” or a “concept for measuring value”, and in the common sense meaning as an “index of creditable claim due to the acceptability originating from the issuer’s creditworthiness.” This separation rectifies the most important deficiency in the definitions of money offered by the credit theory.

Civil participation contract is one of the highly used methods in banking resources allocation. Using this method in Islamic banking is contingent upon the jurisprudential measures and standards’ being observed in the phase of concluding and enforcing the contract. Given the problems in the contracts between banks and their customers, Iranian central bank, in 1392, formulated civil participation contract as a uniform one and ordered the banks to enforce it. Our main question, here, is that whether this contract formulated by the central bank is consistent with the general and special regulations of transactions. Using descriptive and content analysis method, and examining the sources of Imamiah jurisprudence, the present article tries to prove the hypothesis that although it has been tried to observe the jurisprudential rules in formulating the civil participation contract, it still suffers from some important defects, neglecting which will undermine the contract’s legitimacy. The results imply that inconsistency with the contract’s necessities, illegitimately earning property, and profit guaranteeing provision’s being usurious are some of the important defects of the contract, which could be resolved exploiting proper solutions.