نشریه کتاب نقد
پیاپی 44 (پاییز 1386)

Religion sets human course toward God and provides them with a plan for their worldly life. The way religion introduces itself is evidence to that fact.Studying objectives of religion is vital for achieving the identity of religious propositions and their spiritual capacity to make plans for human life. If it is proven that religion does not simply seek to oversee personal affairs and individual’s relations to God, but has paid attention to all structures and systems of life in the living world, so that, by establishing networked justice, humanity could turn its concept of God into a detailed understanding of his infinite being, knowledge and power, the capacity of religious propositions would not be limited to worship or simply guidance, but they would be used to make plans for production of systems and structures that are needed in this worldly life to get connected to God.This paper has taken two extra-religious and intra-religious approaches to analysis of the objectives of religion. Finally, objectives of religion have been presented in two layers: in its intermediate layer, religion considers networked justice as its main objective, while in its topmost layer; the main objective is the feeling of God’s presence (as an index of worship).To achieve those objectives, religion has come up with special system that would allow humans to find an increasing sense of God’s presence in their lives while, at the same time, managing their worldly needs by moving in those management systems.These two objectives have been presented as 18 detailed objectives which are taken from religious texts.Attention to objectives of religion in process of extracting systems of life from religious sources will increase efficiency of religion in competition with human ideas and systems and will reveal the true meaning of the Quranic verse that “if you were faithful, you would prevail.”

Since the advent of Quran and Islam, many fields of knowledge have appeared among Muslims all of which are connected by religion and religious understanding and are focused on such fields of knowledge as interpretation of Quran, theosophy, ethics, jurisprudence, traditions…. Islamic education has been one of the main fields that have interested Muslims from the very beginning. Islamic knowledge can be divided into three general categories: 1)Islamic jurisprudence, which tries to delineate religious obligations of people;2)Islamic ethics, which tries to explain moral obligations; and3)Theosophy, which can be considered as a breeding ground for the aforesaid fields and proves superiority of Islamic jurisprudence, ethics and other fields of knowledge.All fields of Islamic knowledge are based on the above three fields and are their ramifications.The author’s main concern has always been to defend Islamic theosophy and theosophists. Therefore, other fields have not been discussed in detail and the paper focuses on pathologies and challenges facing religious research by traditional theosophists. Of course, the necessity of attention to pathologies threatening other fields has not been denied. In the meantime, we should know that religious research and its ramifications are far more extensive than the three above fields. Even such fields as sociology of religion, psychology of religion, history of religions, and philosophy of religion currently fall within the limits of religious research and each has its own strengths and weaknesses, which should be discussed in a separate paper.

Religion and religious ideas are among the most important human values and can be viewed from various sociological, social, theosophical and philosophical angles. Religious ideas have been studied from practical and theoretical angles by intellectuals and researchers and their efforts have given rise to religious research in the Islamic society. Although some studies are reliable and move social institutions and individual behavior toward the divine source and get them close to God. However, some other studies are flaws in both theoretical and practical terms. Theoretical crisis include challenges related to knowledge, philosophy, and theosophy while practical crises are related to social and behavioral problems. Although the author considers himself as a traditional researcher of religion, he is aware of weaknesses in this field and maintains that those problems should be studied with care to help religious research thrive.

This paper will try to raise new questions in the field of theosophy and divine action, whose result will be fundamental, profound and basic developments in behaviors of the faithful community. The author has chosen his cohort out of four main groups of atheists, hypocrites, religious people doing good, and religious people not doing good and focuses on the last group to define basic differences between the two last groups in terms of their beliefs, especially in relation to recognition of divine action. The paper finally discusses the mechanism of divine action and presents six principles to introduce main pillars of the mechanism of divine action.The paper is divided into three topics:Topic One: Divine action and necessity of discussion

Importance of mystical studies based on Islam, which stems from increased demands in modern societies, richness of Islamic mysticism and the risk of promotion of deviant spiritual ideas, which are not compatible with the Islamic culture and ideas, calls for more attention to this field and taking measures to make up for the existing shortcoming.Taking underlying conditions, motivations and individual performance of researchers into consideration, major problems with studies on Islamic mysticism can be divided in three categories: underlying problems, researchers’ problems, and problems resulting from performance of researchers. However, all researchers are expected to do their best to overcome obstacles and increase their endeavors in every one of three aforesaid fields. Most problems that have been studied stem from incorrect ideas and insufficient information, cultural obstacles and problems with research methodology. This paper the most important related topics will be discussed.

This paper will focus on reasons of different interpretations of Quranic verses related to women. Also non-contextual reasons like time and gender will be discussed and extremes in treating women and relation between their rights and religious teachings will be analyzed. For example, Verse 34 of Chapter Nisa has been mentioned and interpretations of that Quranic verse have been compared. Using the results of comparison, various viewpoints about religious research on women will be presented and some common viewpoints will be criticized.