نشریه علوم سیاسی
سال بیست و پنجم شماره 1 (پیاپی 97، بهار 1401)

The present research aims to consider the impact of the degrees of divine unity on the Islamic government. Drawing on the methods of theology, the research emphasizes the necessity of spreading divine unity in various behavioral, structural, and formal domains of politics and government. Its contribution is the presentation of certain requirements of political unity “in the government” and “on the government.” The findings of the research show that, unlike the view that distinguishes theology from jurisprudence and religious beliefs from the practices of believers, it should be acknowledged that religious beliefs are not subjective categories in isolation from the domain of the practices of believers. To the contrary, such beliefs are preparations for those practices. Accordingly, if divine unity (or monotheism) as the most significant religious belief does not appear in individual and social practices of believers, and they do not lead a monotheistic life, then this would just be a subjective belief that actually has no effects on God’s exclusive rule and divine laws in the society. Of course, various dimensions of divine unity, such as legislative (tashrīʿī) and guardian (wilāʾī) monotheism, should be present in individual aspects of people’s lives, and should also lead to the rule of God in the society. They should negate the rule of anything but God and negate secularism in government. Moreover, they should affect different dimensions of government, including the impact of the unity of lordship and unity of guardianship on the government, the impact of the unity of obedience in the governing process, the impact of monotheism on the features of government, and the impact of monotheism on the governmental approach to jurisprudence.

The present research aims to study the notion of trust as a foundation of equality in the views of Nāʾīnī. In his portrait of a just government (or in his words, guardianship monarchy [salṭanat wilāyatiyya]), Nāʾīnī gives a central role to trust (amāna) in all affairs, and hence, he applies this jurisprudential principle, which was mostly applicable to private law, to the domain of public law. He deployed notions of private law in the domain of public law in order to prepare the minds of people at the time for embracing new concepts. Nāʾīnī believed that government was a trust, rulers were trustees, and people were trustors. The method of this research is descriptive-analytic, and our findings show that Nāʾīnī assigned an equal role and right to all members of the society (as trustors) in his view of government as trust. As a result, governments are required to observe such equality for the citizens in political and social affairs.

Although development of communicative technologies has formed online network communities on the cyberspace and has deeply affected people’s individual and social behaviors, there are very few empirical studies of how such newly emerged networks connect and influence the participation behaviors of citizens in political affairs. The present research addresses the following question: can virtual social networks affect students’ political participation? The research hypothesis was put to an empirical test through questionnaires presented to students of the University of Qom. The validity of the questionnaire is based on Cronbach’s alpha statistic. The data were analyzed through SPSS software under Windows. The statistic population was studied given a division of social networks into horizontal, vertical, and social solidarity, and given five aspects of political participation; that is, electing (first level), political monitoring (second level), being elected (third level), participation and engagement in inner structural reforms (fourth level), and measures taken to bring fundamental changes in political institutions (fifth level). Our findings show that horizontal networks are the most influential, and vertical networks are the least influential in political participations of the users of virtual social networks. The present research is a correlational study, with the method of data collection of the post-event variety.

Many people believe that jihad is a fight on the path of God to defend the religion and combat injustice. A closer look, however, provides us with a range of interpretations of this major religious doctrine, which as individual and social dimensions. Jihad seems to have more serious social and non-military capacities. The present research aims to explicate the notion of jihad in Ayatollah Khamenei’s view. Data from his speeches from 1989 to 2021 have been selected and then analyzed with a qualitative approach, using the method of network of themes. The analysis of the network theme consists of three stages: extraction of basic themes, organizing themes, and global themes, and it finally analyzes the global themes as final results. Five global themes have been identified for jihad in Ayatollah Khamenei’s view, which shows that jihad is a fundamental doctrine and a divine obligation that plays a key role in all dimensions of the human life. Jihad is closely tied to notions such as construction of oneself and construction of others, social responsibility, enjoining the right and forbidding the wrong, fighting against all obstacles and enemies, and attempt to achieve a thriving, justice-based society. In Ayatollah Khamenei’ view, a society without jihad is an idle indifferent society that always lags behind and remains defeated. In his view, the secret to victory against the unjust rulers of the world is to give pride of place to jihad in all aspects of life.

The present research aims to explain the ideological biased representations of political developments in specific news media. This is a descriptive-analytic research, which analyzes the data with combination of quantitative and qualitative methods. To do so, two domestic media (the website of IRI News Network and Press TV) as representatives of the discourse of the Islamic Republic and two foreign media (the website of the Voice of America Persian News Network and English BBC) as representatives of the Western side in the period from the American exit from the JCPOA agreement to the final step by Iran in reducing its nuclear commitments. The data were analyzed by utilizing the theoretical principles of the critical discourse and the theoretical framework of Halliday in functional linguistics. The results of the linguistic study of the news titles in these media show that each discourse tries to blame the other side for the failure of JCPOA. This ideological approach is confirmed by a linguistic analysis of the news titles of the rival discourses. Moreover, on behalf of their relevant discourses, these media try to highlight their positive measures and attribute plausible features to their own discourse. In this way, they highlight certain acts and actors to marginalize others, and sometimes they give directions to their audiences with partial or biased information.

The Middle East is the origin and confluence of conflicting identities, as a consequence of which crisis is reproduced in the region. The most significant problem in understanding the nature and continuity of crisis in the Middle East is the discovery of the process of reproduction of conflicting identities in this geographical region. In one form or another, conflicting identities in the Middle East give rise to a variety of crises, no solution to which has been offered yet. The main question of this research is how crisis is reproduced and perpetuated in the Middle East. A possible answer is that the main origin of crisis in the Middle East seems to be the existence of conflicting identities in the region, which reproduces conflicting identities and perpetuates crisis there. Part of identity conflict in the region has its roots in domestic elements such as historical experience, domestic variables that constitute conflicting identities such as Wahhabism, Al-Qaeda, ISIS, as well as the relation between governments and elites. Another part of such conflict is rooted in foreign factors such as colonialism and political Islam (at the level of the Islamic world), which lead to identity threats. On these criteria, the present article offers a formulation of the cycle of crisis in the Middle East in light of conflicting identities so that we can have an understanding of the nature of crisis and its perpetuation.

The present research aims to study the role of the media of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the European Union concerning developments in Syria. The results of the descriptive-analytic research show that the media in question deploy various framings in line with foreign policy goals of their respective countries. That is, there is a meaningful relation between the performance of the media and the direction of their foreign policies, in keeping with which specific semantic components of the crisis stage are portrayed and framed. Drawing on Goffman’s theory and the idea of framing, media try to formulate the realities of the crisis scene in certain semantic frames. The framing by Media in Iran has ideological, cultural, and security specifications, while those in the European Union pursue a political-security and economic frame in the Syrian crisis

Some intellectuals in the Islamic world seek to homogenize the tradition and modernity by purifying the former and providing a governmental model that fits modern life and is based on the tradition. Mohammed Abed al-Jabri and Mohammed Arkoun, two intellectuals of the Islamic world, have conceptualize the issue, respectively, as Arabic reason and Islamic reason. The question is why Mohammed Abed al-Jabri and Mohammed Arkoun have talked about two different notions of reason—Arabic and Islamic—in the face of the rationality constructed from the Islamic tradition, and how such duality would affect the political and its governmental exemplification. The hypothesis of the present research is that Mohammed Abed al-Jabri sees the tradition in the cultural framework and identity elements such as language, social structures, and power relations within the Arabic society, while Arkoun sees it in a civilizational background and efforts made by ethnicities, cultures, and interactions with others, as well as religious authority and its Islamic principles