Journal of Islamic Political Studies
Volume:1 Issue: 2, Summer-Autumn 2019

The main question of the article is "Does every nation have the right to" peace" and "security"?" Each of the above concepts can independently belong to the right to citizenship and can be counted as two separate rights; however, they can refer to a single right because of the close relationship they have with each other. On the one hand, every nation has the right to live in peace and to meet its other basic needs in order to achieve "perfection and prosperity" because one cannot think of such things under conditions of war and unrest. Order and security are considered as one of the most basic rights of any nation and "justice and development" in their various dimensions are not achievable without order and security under chaotic conditions. The subject of this article is the position of these rights in the sphere of Islamic thought. Has such a right been recognized for people in Islamic thought to expect and demand it from their government? What are the foundations and evidence of this right in Islamic sources? The method used to answer this question is to refer to the authentic Islamic sources, namely, the intellect, the Qur'an, and the Sunnah used in this article. According to these sources, it is clear that citizens have such a right in Islamic society and can claim it from the Islamic state.

The brotherhood model in the words of Amir al-Momenin can be a good model for achieving equality and repudiation of despotism. To achieve social justice, the model “simple equality” has been generally proposed by scholars as a way to perpetuate equality and, in consequence, social justice. Despite all its advantages, the simple equality model faces the serious challenges of disregarding cultural competency and pluralism. Accordingly, the theory “complex equality” was proposed by Walzer as a new approach to underlining cultural pluralism and basing the notion of good on the attitude of distribution. Impeding the spread of inequality and taking account of various notions of goods pave the way for the realization of a complex equality model. In his letter to Malek al-Ashtar regarding the repudiation of despotism, Imam Ali stressed the concept of brotherhood in faithand human equality. The brotherhood model consisting of layers of brotherhood in faith , Islamic brotherhood, brotherhood in faith , and even brotherhood in humanity can be a competing theory in the topic of equality in which social inequality is not only controlled (the negative approach), but it also turns into positive inequality, where everyone sustains loss to the advantage of others (the positive approach). This model of brotherhood which entails relations between ruler and subject not only contains the social despotism that Walzer evades, but it also deals with it. The living model of brotherhood presents a distribution network based on which negative inequalities not only cease to spread in society, but the ground for spreading equality and positive inequality is also provided by fostering brotherhood in complex human networks.

Regarding the structure of government and the interconnection of its components, we can speak of justice on two levels. First, the "structural justice" level together with the question, "what normative principles guarantee the realization of "justice"-as 'placing everything where they belong to in the structural arrangement of the components of government?" And second, the "poststructural justice" level together with the question, "what principles guarantee the 'justice' with the same definition, after the formation of the structure of government?" This study asks the mentioned questions upon Nahj al-Balagha's letters. Besides, it infers the answers to those questions by discovering distinctive principles at the two levels of "justice in the structure of government" and "justice after the formation of the structure of government" using the descriptiveanalytical method and searching in the library resources. The letters of Nahj al-Balagha present norms for the two fields of "employee recruitment" and "post-recruitment'; as they offer standards for the two areas of "relation with people" and "relation with the enemy" regarding post-structural justice. Despite the simplicity of the government structure in Imam Ali's era, this study believes that meeting the mentioned principles leads complex structure of the modern governments and results of their activities to notable levels of "justice in the structure of government

Some intellectual challenges have arisen in the semantic system of Muslims since the introduction of the semantic indications of modern discourse into the Muslim world. "Nationalist Citizenship" and its resulting rights is one of the categories used as an indicator for measuring political justice in contemporary societies. This indication has not yet been fully adapted to the semantic system of Muslims intellectually. In some Islamic states, especially in countries with more religious minorities, efforts have been made to address this challenge. However, the question remains theoretically unanswered. Using a semiotic approach, the present paper seeks to examine the conceptual dimensions of membership in the Muslim political community and to pinpoint the intellectual efforts of some contemporary Muslim thinkers to address this issue through a review of the emerging challenges in Muslim semantic system as a result of the introduction of citizenship political rights. Some modernist Muslim thinkers are trying to pave the way to overcome these challenges by moving over some anthropological conceptual dualities. This article aims to examine the extent to which these theoretical efforts have been adapted in the overall Islamic semantic system.

Considering the inclusion of cultural-political orientation in the propaganda of the Islamic Republic (Independence, Freedom, Islamic Republic), the present paper aims to address how the cultural-political development in the Islamic Republic of Iran could be analyzed and evaluated in the period 1990-1998, i.e. the first years following the Islamic Republic and the Imposed War. The answer that will be analyzed in this research is that in this period, despite the foreign historical hindrance and domestic mental impediments, which made cultural-political developments face various dilemmas, the government’s cultural-political development, endeavors of political forces and theoretical experts created a positive transformation in cultural-political development. The reasoning set out in this paper is that, based on the modified Communicative Action Theory and its adaptation to the Iranian history and society, and also the dominant religious traditions in the social relations in Iran, the first revision of the Constitution led to some cultural-political practices from government and some cultural-political efforts by the experts and political forces which, ultimately, resulted in an open cultural, and somehow political, atmosphere. These are clues to the cultural-political development in this period.

Because of the reality that the concept of citizenship would be defined alongside and in relation to the concept of state, some other concepts, such as identity, participation, rights, and responsibility of citizens, are related to the state in which they live. Explaining the context, scope, content, and the depth of the concept of citizenship in a democratic state arose from an Islamic school.Using the qualitative content analysis method, the present paper aims to prove its claim that the content of citizenship in Iran, based on the theological, juridical, and ethical substances of Imam Khomeini's thought, differs from the content of citizenship in its common use.The paper addresses this question: what kind of mechanism has benefited the Islamic Republic of Iran in identical, participatory, distributive, legitimately, and efficient levels? Answering this question, the paper comes to the conclusion that though the Islamic Republic of Iran, because of the eight years’ war, economic sanctions, and other obstacles, lost the opportunity to realize the real setting of citizenship and has solved the problem of identity crisis with the mechanism of political socialization. The Islamic Republic of Iran has also stressed the civic and social equality in the citizenship scope. Because of this and using the mechanism of social justice as equality of opportunities and possibilities, it succeeds to overcome the distribution crisis. Also, applying the mechanism of political recruitment, the Islamic Republic of Iran has scrunched the participation crisis. The concept of citizenship the Islamic Republic of Iran follows the idea of identity and tautology between rights and duties and sees a strong correlation between these two. Thus, it sees itself at the service of the nation and assumes the nation as the helper and assistant of the government. This perspective has helped it to solve the problem of legitimation crisis with the aid of the mechanism of global culture. It has also solved the problem of efficiency with the mechanism of Jihadi management.

To seek the intellectual roots of the Iranian constitutionalism, one has to be back to the preconstitutionalism epoch. Indeed, in that time, Iranian elites had recognized the "deterioration" as the main crisis of Iran, which was rooted in the problem of “despotism.” Their strategy to overcome this crisis was the “Law.”However, the key point was that the majority of intellectual elites had thoughtcodifying the law is the only job that has to be done. Nevertheless, they did not pay attention to the mechanism of how to move from traditional legal logic to the new one in Iran. In the Iranian Tanzimat period, considering the two concepts of law in the European lands (the political and the rational concepts), the idea of law seems to base on the rational concept. In that time, debates were on the explanation, justification, and interpretation of the law. All the utterances were about: which law is the right one? What is the proper criterion to pass a legal regulation? Must the law be written based on nature, the tradition, the practices, or the divine Sharia? This article is going to assess the represented hypothesis by investigating some works of intellectual elites and historical documents of Iranian pre-constitutionalism.