Authority of the General Rules of Law when There Are Religious Specifying Rule

After victory of the Islamic Revolution, a great part of our penal laws were taken from jurisprudence. The legislator, while he has been strictly committed to the religious rules, has approved this group of laws in a selective way. Sometimes, he has not mentioned a [religious] rule itself; and, some other times, he has not mentioned its consequences,conditions, and constraints. Here, the author discusses to find when, in such cases, general rules of law should be followed and when a specified religious rule should be followed. Some scholars think that the legislator is committed to the religious rules shows that he acts according to the particular; and, relying upon the Article 167 of the Constitution according to which the judge, on the pretext of the silence of or deficiency of law in the matter, or its brevity or contradictory nature, cannot refrain from admitting and examining cases and delivering his judgment and in such cases he has to deliver his judgment on the basis of authoritative Islamic sources and authentic fatwa, and the case of 'absolute' and 'general' has nothing to do with the above, some others are of the opinion that no act can be taken on the basis of the particular. The author believes that, in this regard, the particular and generally accepted rules differ from those which are disputed. In the former case (for example rules concerning abstainer and observer) one should refer to the specifying religious rules; in the latter, however, general law should be followed.