فصلنامه سراج منیر
پیاپی 6 (بهار 1391)

In the legal systems of Islam and of the Islamic Republic of Iran there exist certain differences in laws for men and women, which are sometimes subject to questions or criticism. One such issue is the inequality of men and women in inheritance and diya. An examination of Islamic juridical and legal rules reveals that ‘diya’ is described as blood money by some authorities in the subject, as a penalty by some others, and as restitution by others, while some other authorities consider it as having penal, substitutionaryand compensational, and preventive aspects. Moreover, the philosophy behind the difference between men and women with regards to ‘diya’ and inheritance is informed by another characteristic feature of the Islamic legal system, the one which burdens men with the responsibility of headship of the family and paying for the family expenses.

After the Holy Qur’an, hadith is the second most credible source for the study of the faith and determining human beings’ path of happiness. Reliance upon this source is greater in some areas of religious studies, including jurisprudence (fiqh) and parts of ethics; the reason is that the grounding principles of these sciences are indicated briefly in the Qur’an, the details being left to be found in hadith. By way of examining books of hadith and books of juridical principle, this paper seeks to find the answer to the question whether hadith is accountable in ethics or not, and that if it is, then how far its impact and scope go. For this purpose, chapters on ethics in some source texts on juridical principles and on ethics are studied and accountability of hadith in ethics is thereby established, while it was found out that ethics strongly needs hadith both for its establishment, i.e. defining its concepts, and for establishing, i.e. approving its propositions, and that hadith is the supporting pillar required for the practice of ethical codes.

‘Impact description of the Qur’an’ is an independent science whose subject of investigation are narrations by the Shi‘a Fourteen Infallibles on the descriptive explanation of the verses and chapters of the Qur’an. These descriptive narrations can be classified into different types and then studied. One type consists of those which explain the superiority that some verses have over others, either because of certain purposes they imply or due to their theme. This set of narrations can be referred to as ‘impact superiority of the verses of the Qur’an’ and regarded as one of the important topics of the science of ‘the Impact Superiority of the Verses of the Qur’an’ as was discussed in a paper entitled ‘An introduction to the theory of the impact superiority of the Qur’an’ published in the 3rd issue of this journal. The present paper, however, seeks to collect and present the most important preferential narrations and briefly examine their documents and references, as well as to provide an answer to the inevitable question as regards the justification for the superiority of some verses over other.

Weakness of the narrators of ‘hadith’, ways of identifying such a weakness, and its relationship to the legitimacy or illegitimacy of attributing hadiths to the Infallible Ones are all among major concerns of the science of hadith and the science of biographical evaluation. In this paper, Behboudi’s views on how to identify weaknesses of narrators of hadith are examined. The examination is organized through exploring his views on the causes of emergence of the science of hadith, on the principle of biographical evaluation for Shi‘as, and the methodology employed by their authors, as well as on the terms ‘jarh’ (discrediting) and ‘zu‘afā’ (weak narrators). An analysis of his views on biographical evaluation and his ‘history of hadith’ reveals that in Behboudi’s view, the efforts of Shi‘a scholars did not successfully prevent penetration of exaggerated and pagan ideas into Shi‘a hadith heritage, resulting in much fabrications being recorded in Shi‘a hadith books and many weak narrators being included in Shi‘a hadith documents.

The corporeal afterlife and belief in it is one of the important requirements of Islam; so much so that the disbelief in it is equal to profanity. Various views have been held by Islamic scholars on the quality of the afterlife. The subject has been looked into theologically by theologians, philosophically by philosophers, and with focus on hadith by hadith scholars. This paper seeks to examine viewpoints of two of the great Islamic exegetists of the Qur’an in Shia and Sunni traditions, AllamehTabatab’i and Alousi respectively, by analyzing in their respective books, al-Mizan and Ruh al-Ma‘ani, their exegeses of the verses which imply the corporeal afterlife. Alousi adopts a theological approach arguing that, in the afterlife, the human being will be the same as what he was in the world after his scattered pieces converge together. Allameh Tabataba’i, however, adopts a philosophical approach and argues that what happens in the afterlife is conversion not convergence, and that the sameness is in the soul not the body – which will not be the same as that of the world, but similar to it.

The speech exchange is an act of communication through which a message is transferred from the speaker to the hearer and so depending on the audience and the message being expressed, it takes the name of dialogue or monologue. Having been taken from the Greek word dialogos, dialogue consists of two parts: logos meaning “word” and dia meaning “within”. In some cases, dialogue lacks a external audience, i.e. the person tells his thoughts to himself or tells his thoughts to a person who does not show an immediate reaction or response towards his speech. Thus, we can regard all prayers and lyric poems as different kinds of monologue. Accordingly, this paper investigates the “dialogue” in some of the stories of the Holy Quran both from the view point of the speaker and the hearer as well as the subject matter. Although the main goal of this paper is to discuss the role of dialogue, some monologues are also examined in these stories.

In each language, both from the semantic and morphological aspects, adages are of great importance. Being full of wisdom, the quranic adages have been investigated by the quranic scholars for a long time. Moreover, the attention to the quranic adages has been increased from the early period of Islam. This attention has been to the extent that in addition to the miscellaneous works in the religious or literary books, more than sixteen monographs have been written in this field. In the Persian literary tradition there are a lot of poems which are regarded as adages and with the aid of deep thinking in their meaning we can find out how deeply their poets are influenced by the quranic adages. This influence is made directly through adapting the holy verses or being inspired by them. In this paper, we try to find the verses which are taken as proverbs and their influences on the Persian poetry.