فصلنامه اسلام و مطالعات اجتماعی
پیاپی 1 (تابستان 1392)

A correct understanding of Iran’s political-social developments is among the urgent needs of the present generation, and its connection with religious associations of the society makes it doubly required. Since the clergy during the glorious Islamic Revolution were deemed as one of the specialized classes of the society in religious, scientific, political and social respects, the internal movements within this organization—which play a role in the fate of the social-political system of Iran—gives us a more correct understanding of various issues of the society and the sort of encounter with scientific, political and social events. It is not fully possible to know these intellectual movements accurately and tell their stories realistically, since there are no written sources about them to be described with; rather they are processes in reaction to a variety of developments and events. Of course, with some leniency, we can classify the intellectual movements of the clergy in the Islamic Seminaries of Iran from different viewpoints. This paper will examine these movements from five viewpoints; each with their own pluralities. It needs to be mentioned that because of the ambiguity of these viewpoints and for the sake of brevity, I have avoid mentioning names of people who were active in these movements, and I have restricted myself to the description of their intellectual principles and fundamental approaches.

The (non-ordinary) relations between girls and boys is one of the ever-worsening problems in our society. The development of the sexual instinct with the increase in the sexual stimuli in the society has neutralized the advice of forbidding the free relation to some extent and the distance between sexual maturity and social maturity has made early marriage impossible. This kind of relations is deemed as ordinary and even favorable in the Western culture, but it is, in an Islamic society, a crisis to be solved. One of the proposed solutions is temporary marriage, but it is often considered as meeting the needs of boys, whereas the needs and the problems of girls in this issue should also be considered. This paper is concerned with the problem of what way can be proposed for managing the sexual needs of girls in the present situations and what is the place of temporary marriage in this respect? Relying on the strategy of ‘taking the youth responsible to their behaviors towards the opposite sex’, the paper tries to show how these behaviors can be, as far as possible, managed by families, with a new, disciplined and legitimated picture, and how can the social concerns about the propagation of temporary marriage can be overcome, in addition to the control and legitimization of the sexual relations of girls and boys.

This paper is concerned with the methodology of the social thoughts of Ibn Rushd. Ibn Rushd was one of the philosophers of the Western part of the Islamic world and one of the commentators of Aristotle’s works. His methodology was different from that of the philosophers of the Eastern part of the Islamic world, such as Ibn Sina. His growth in a family of scholars and the occupation of significant governmental positions provided grounds for his academic promotion and the propagation of his thoughts about the issues of his time. Monotheism and the belief in the prophecy in addition to teleology and the belief in the intellect and revelation—as two important epistemic sources—were influential principles on his methodology and thoughts. Interpretation, demonstration and the critical method were Ibn Rushd’s methodological guides to which he was committed and which he followed in his social thoughts. The reconciliation between religion and philosophy and the illustration of the utopia were problems to which he answered by using these methods.

The model of human development, despite its attractive appearance, lacks the content and perfection required for the developing countries. The content of the “ordinary human development” is secular, that is, it is neutral with respect to the religion and religious values. If the society is religious, the content of the development will to some extent become religious, but the system and the main institutes of this society will still be non-religious. Human development, like other present approaches to the development, does not pay adequate attention to the fundamental and direct factors of development; it does not analyze the problem of underdevelopment, while this is the main problem. If we do not have a correct pathology of the underdevelopment of the countries and just rely on the wishes and wants of the human in the way to the development, the problem cannot find its solution. This is a discovery research and the main question is why the model of human development does not have the required resources to solve the problems of the developing countries, and in particular, the Islamic ones. The methodology of the research is the collection of documentary or library information, and in the development issues, the method is analytical. The main sections of the paper concern what, why and how questions about the human developments, and why the model of human development fails. The research finds that this model holds no difference between the right and the wrong, and the index of the human development cannot discriminate between unjust and dependent countries from the just and independent ones.

The main problem of this paper is the functions and malfunctions of the pursuit of one of the essentials of the religious government which is tied to one of the most complicated cultural problems of the contemporary world; gender distinction, sexual crisis, and body identification. In the sociology of Hijab, my approach will be to employ the theoretical framework of the secularization of religion, which is in its own right a controversial issue, but with the acceptance of the principle that the Islamic government cannot overlook God’s commands, I will address the malfunctions and the possible and practical consequences of the implementation such a command in order to attract the attention of policy-makers and the cultural-social officials to the complicated problems of religion and culture and add prevention, reconsidered and protective processes to the totality of the strategies for the promotion and reform of Hijab. The methodology of this research is analytical and descriptive, and is based on documents, news and political and field observation, in addition to primary resources. Moreover, the paper contains a descriptive classification of the strategies and an environmental analysis of the Government’s encounter with violations of Hijab.

Mosques, as the most original cultural institution originated from the religious thought, has many capacities to play roles in the cultural life of an Islamic society. Like any other phenomena, mosques can best play their roles in different social relations just in case there is a correct policy-making and management. One of the important dimensions of policy-making and management of mosques are the functional dimensions of this holy institution. By examining religious and historical sources, the paper has identified ten functions for mosques in an Islamic society, and development of these functions has been examined in the following four periods: (1) the period of early Islam: the flourishing of the mosques; (2) the period of victories and the beginning of Muslims’ relations with other cultures: the deviance of mosques from their religious positions; (3) the period of the political movements of the Islamic people: the return to non-individualistic functions; Finally, the way in which these functions have been addressed after the Islamic Revolution to the present has been analyzed and reconsidered in order for us to be able to think about the policy of the promotion of the place of mosques in the Islamic Republic of Iran.

This paper is concerned with the examination and analysis of the TV approach to the religious rites with an emphasis on the Ramadan Month as one of the longest periods for delivering religious messages via TV. This approach, affected by definitions and possibilities of religion-media relations, has various forms of methodological or conceptual problems in the process of producing video contents. In addition to the attempt to review the main ambiguous points in the minds of working managers, the paper tries to examine and analyze successful or unsuccessful experiences and provide proposals in order to re-read the definition of media and religion in order to facilitate the employment of this technology in lines with the objectives of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The conflict between religion and media, the emphasis on dialogue, the adjustment of the degree of employing attractions, avoiding plurality and the production of media rites are some of the problems discussed in this paper, and at the end, some policies have been proposed in this respect.