Judicial-Criminal Policy of the Islamic Republic of Iran towards Traditional and Electronic Press Offenses

Ayatollah Khomeini, the Islamic Republic of Iran’s spiritual leader, in the immediate days of the 1979 Revolution contemplated promoting of Shi’ite religious doctrinal values in the Muslim World. In Khomeini’s view the Islamic Republic was obliged to design a strategy to effectively instill Shi’ite core doctrinal values in young minds and within the academic community in the largely Sunnite majority Muslim states. Khomeini used the narrative of ‘exporting the revolution’ to attain this objective of the Islamic Republic. The Islamic Republic’s religious sectarian establishment’s strategy of exporting revolution among others focused on educational diplomacy that is sponsoring a host of educational initiatives such as establishment of Jāmicah al-Muṣṭafā al-Cālamīyyah or al-Mustafa International University (MIU) branches and promoting its activities across the Muslim World. MIU is a sizable university with a number of overseas branches operating across the Muslim World. This paper discusses the role of the MIU in the conduct of Islamic Republic’s educational diplomacy in Malaysia and Afghanistan in Iran’s quest for promoting Shi’ite doctrinal values, soft power and greater influence in politics of the Muslim World. A word of caution is in order. Throughout this paper, the terms ‘Irano-Islamic’ or ‘Islamic’ in the Islamic Republic of Iran’s official documents and Iranian literature refers to Shi’ite version of Islam and the declared official ideology of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Within the various theoretical perspectives of Islam, the issue of legitimacy of rule has traditionally been dealt with most notably as that of legitimate ruler. This apparently holds true in the both cases of the theory of the Sunni caliphate, and that of the Shi'ite infallible Imamate. The contemporary debate in the Islamic Republic of Iran over the differing perspectives on the sources of legitimacy of the rule of the jurist (wilayat-i faqih), on which I have previously published an article in this journal, was no exception.In this article, I will further consider the question of legitimacy in Islamic rule by examining the contemporary debate in the Islamic Republic of Iran with the following steps. First, I will start the examination with bearing the following question in mind, that is, is it still convincingly arguable that the issue of legitimacy of rule in an Islamic regime can be adequately dealt with by considering who is the legitimate ruler, even after the establishment of an regime called “Islamic republic” in Iran? Second, I will attempt to enlarge the scope of the investigation by examining two articles written by Sa'id Hajjarian (b. 1954), a leading non-clerical theoretician of Iran today.After carefully reading the two articles published in Rahbord and 'Asr-e Ma, respectively, I will preliminarily conclude that with the establishment of the Islamic Republic, a new perspective on the issue of legitimacy of rule in Islam, that is, the issue of the legitimacy of the regime has been successfully brought into the debate, and that very interestingly, this normative concept concerning the nature of the regime takes a logical precedence over the legitimacy of the ruler in the argument of Sa'id Hajjarian. The article ends with a note that in a future examination, I intend to further critically examine the so-called intikhabi perspective of the legitimacy of the wilayat-i faqih system in light of the expanded debate on the issue.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsThe Shadow of God and the Hidden Imam: Religion, Political Order and Societal Change in Shi'ite Iran from the Beginning to 1890. Said Amir Arjomand The Government of God, Iran's Islamic Republic. Cheryl Benard , Zalmay Khalilzad Louay BahryLouay Bahry Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Politics Volume 48, Number 1Feb., 1986 Sponsored by the Southern Political Science Association Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.2307/2130962 Views: 3Total views on this site Copyright 1985 Southern Political Science AssociationPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

This essay takes a stylized paradoxical fact of Iranian politics under the Islamic Republic of Iran as its starting point: the stark confusion between the position and a good portion of the opposition. Such a blurred frontier between “position” and “opposition” did not exist during the shah's regime. Without the decisive support of non-Islamic organizations, secular intellectuals, and political forces on the ground, the creation of a theocratic regime in Iran and its consolidation could not be realized. Now on the thirtieth anniversary of the Islamic Republic, the open opposition of many influential clerics toward how the government is run under the present supreme leader and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad provides a new episode of “opposition” within the theocrats' circles. To put this paradoxical fact differently, it should be emphasized that no regime in Iran's modern history has produced so much opposition within its own ranks and enjoyed the loyalty of its oppositions at the same time. How could this paradox be explained? Our essay tackles this issue by describing the peculiar type of social order under the Islamic Republic of Iran as ordered anarchy or “destructive coordination.” Analyzing the sources of this type of coordination, we proceed in two steps. The first is to question whether there has ever been a laic or secular movement in Iran's recent history. The second consists in defining the institutional setup and recent dynamics of the Islamic Republic of Iran as a strange, if not unique, mutant of Samuel P. Huntington's praetorian state, led by “priests” and armed religious militants.

during the Second World War by the United States for purely military purposes. Since then, extensive civilian research and the use of nuclear technologies for peaceful ends has not erased this military heritage. Almost all nuclear technology in use around the world today is ‘dual use’, able to contribute to the production of fuel for nuclear reactors or the explosive components of nuclear weapons. For this reason, there is serious concern that supposedly peaceful nuclear programmes are being used for, or could become, cover for the development of nuclear weapons. The inherent ambiguity surrounding almost all nuclear technology complicates the control of nuclear energy. Under the terms of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), non-nuclear-weapons states must declare all their nuclear facilities and activities and permit them to be safeguarded by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). To date all cases of noncompliance have involved states failing to declare nuclear facilities or activities, rather than diverting safeguarded nuclear material.1 In the last few years, for instance, clandestine nuclear activities have been uncovered in Egypt,2 Iran3 and South Korea (Republic of Korea),4 and strong evidence of a clandestine reactor in Syria has emerged.5 These discoveries have prompted debates, of varying intensity, about what, if any, action should be taken in response. The Problem with Nuclear Mind Reading

Since the 1979 Revolution, the clerical regime in Iran has been limiting the legal profession’s autonomy by preventing members of the Iranian Bar Association (IBA) from freely electing their Board of Directors and by establishing a new body of lawyers—legal advisors of the judiciary—to contest the IBA’s professional monopoly. Clerics have even attempted to bring the legal profession under the control of the Ministry of Justice and merge it with the legal advisors. The IBA’s struggle to remain a civil society organisation independent of the judiciary offers a vantage point from which to explore the role of the legal profession in Iranian society and the legal system of the Islamic Republic. Why does the Iranian judiciary oppose an independent legal profession, and why does the profession refuse to capitulate? What are the implications of this ongoing conflict for the legal order of the Islamic Republic, whose political elite consists mainly of Islamic jurists? What are the socio-cultural consequences of undermining the integrity and autonomy of the legal profession? These questions will guide our inquiry.After discussing the IBA’s development before and after the 1979 Revolution, we describe how practising attorneys view the IBA, advocacy, legal practice, legal services and their troubled relationship with the judiciary. They recount the obstacles they encounter within a politicised judicial order and explain how they preserve professional integrity within a legal system that lacks the public’s confidence. We conclude by arguing that the Islamic Republic’s attempt to subordinate the legal profession to administrative and ideological control by the judiciary reflects the clash of two legal cultures. Iranian judges reconstruct and apply Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) as part of their efforts to deliver substantive justice within a codified legal system, while IBA attorneys understand and seek to practise law consistent with the ideals of due process, certainty and uniformity in legal decision-making. (Less)

Hope for a messianic future and the Messiah’s return emerge from everyday life negotiations of some Iranians within the Islamic Republic of Iran. The Islamic Republic has co-opted the religion, messianic hope and the Messiah to build a mode of religious governance and to maintain pro-regime families and the revolutionary youth. I will demonstrate politics of hope in Iran and argue that subscribing to the messianic hope by pro-regime families may appear as a religious expression of futurity or compliance with the Islamic Republic at first glance. However, messianic hope is a mode of world-making to endure militancy, militarization of everyday life, political Islam and the pain caused by a stream of dead bodies coming from different conflict zones. This article builds on the existing debates of hope to show how the reality of ‘the future’ becomes messianic for Shia believers and how social actors carving hope amidst precarities is not an orientation towards the future but rather a mode of making-do.

The U.S. foreign policy program favoring regime change in Iran mobilizes women's rights as a means to garner domestic sympathy for intervention. In doing so, pundits and politicians draw on epistemological assumptions that render Iranian women's lives in binary opposition to those of women in the United States and the West, often misconstruing the day-to-day realities of Iranian women's lives and discounting internal women's rights movements. This essay considers how political characterizations of Iranian women and women in other Muslim-majority countries produce the conditions through which women's rights are understood and studied. In the highly politicized context of regime change, this essay asks: what are the effects of international pressure on local Iranian women and on their movements? Given the anti-imperialist tenor of the 1979 revolution and the centrality of women's rights therein, this essay further considers the effects of contemporary discourses of regime change that highlight women and argues that such discourses can actually hurt internal movements rather than help them. Finally, this essay offers a different way to think about women's rights in these regions, one that involves a rethinking of the terms of the debate itself and moving beyond the binaries of East-West and premodern-modern. In the Iranian framework, we are seeing an instance of modern liberal values in a novel context—an Islamic republic. This essay calls for critical studies of women's rights and human rights that explore the international politicization of women's rights alongside new and complex state formations throughout the world.

During the 1980s, tens of thousands of ideological dissidents from the Islamic Republic of Iran were exposed to religiously motivated exclusionary practices, mass killings, extermination campaigns, and systematic torture. In this article, I examine the genocidal characteristics of these mass atrocities. To this end, I adopt a genealogical approach and shed light on the social-historical process through which genocidal violence emerged and evolved throughout the 1980s in Iran. Specifically, I focus on four historical episodes that each embody an essential dimension of this process. To develop my analysis, I draw on primary theoretical and archival sources, prison memoirs, and survivors’ narratives published over the last three decades. This analysis is methodologically situated in critical discussions in political theory and builds on insights from critical genocide scholarship. As will be shown, genocidal violence unfolds in a conflictual process through which the Islamic Republic defined and classified its leftist opponents as absolute religious others. These religious others were created based on theological signifiers, doctrines, and justifications. In the first phase, the Islamic rulers defined their religious outcasts as apostates, atheists, and religious hypocrites. The second phase of the genocide represents the law-constituting process through which religious outcasts became religious outlaws who were subjected to genocidal extermination. The third phase is characterized by non-lethal techniques and practices of genocidal torture that were devised to enforce religious repentance and conversion to Islam. The final stage is marked by massacres that were kept secret, denied, and disavowed. As a result of this multi-faceted process, religious others of the Islamic Republic were gradually subjected to practices and arrangements that resulted in their physical and symbolic annihilation within Iranian society.

This article tracks the development of opium use in present day Iran. Investigating how opium use is influenced by ideological change within the country, this paper intimately attempts to understand how Iranian intellectual, religious and national movements affected and still affect opium use. Working from an historicist approach, this paper furthermore investigates the changing response of the state to this opiate addiction. Analyzing the Islamic Republic's response to opiate-drug use is key in understanding how state policy decisions are influenced by and embedded within these ideological movements of a nation, and, specifically, how the Islamic Republic’s constitutional policy of maslahat allows for flexible legal strategies to combat drug control. Such an investigation is important, not only in understanding the etiology of Iranian policies of drug control and criminalization, but also in understanding how ideological movements affect an individual’s choice to use illegal substances.

Four decades after the Islamic Revolution in Iran and the rise of the Islamic Republic (IR) system, several anti-IR groups have emerged. In the past, the disorganized structure of these groups, their flaws, and dissonance over a common criterion to support or oppose IR and its activities posed some obstacles to their unity. However, over the last decade, they have reached consensus over the subversion of the IR. As a decentralized and disorganized social movement emerging in the wake of 2017 and 2019 protests, this discourse has gained momentum among the political activists, and more people are joining this trend every day, and it is very popular on Persian language social media, especially on Twitter. Loss of faith in the reforms of the IR is one of the issues upon which this discourse movement has reached a general consensus. By exploring and describing the main signifiers of the disorganized subversion discourse in Iran, the article seeks to identify its major characteristics through the qualitative-descriptive analysis of Farsi Twitter content. The research method was the content analysis of Farsi Twitter hashtags of the most popular user accounts belonging to the subversive movement in Iran by extracting the main signifiers and their discourse analysis to examine the main characteristics of the subversion discourse in Iran after 2017.

Women and Politics in the Islamic Republic of Iran looks at the rise and role of female activism in Iran since the 1979 Revolution. Since 1979 women have played a decisive role in elections and assumed political posts. This study assesses this role as well as the impact of domestic and international policies on women’s activism, highlighting the contradictions between politics and religion within the Islamic Republic. It also seeks to evaluate political and economic developments and the transformations in civil society, including the development of a gender conscious society. Women and Politics in the Islamic Republic of Iran features original research by Sanam Vakil, an Iranian-American scholar, who conducted interviews with women activists, politicians, journalists, clerics and students in Iran, Europe and the U.S. and used primary sources to specifically links women’s activism to the domestic political changes in Iran. The book will be an essential resource for anyone

Recent work in religious studies has turned from a long-standing focus on interior expressions of religion to emphasize instead embodied worship and the materiality of religious expression. Yet, for all the worthwhile critique of experience as a theoretical category, in practice various communities have taken up the language of experience as a central term for their own traditions. Scholars of religion have traced the cross-pollination of modern Hindu and Buddhist traditions with the language of “experience”; however, this question has received little attention in the study of Islam. This article addresses that lacuna. Muslim writings on Islam, specifically within the Islamic Republic of Iran, demonstrate a clear engagement with “religious experience.” The Muslim writers discussed here, major figures of the Iranian reformist movement of the 1990s and 2000s, attempt to craft an arena of religiosity untouchable by state law and the Islamic Republic’s governance of religious action. The tired ones have all departed. Shut the house’s door. Laugh together at those tired people. Come to the Ascension (miʿrāj) since you are the Prophet’s people. Kiss the Moon’s cheek since you stand on heights of splendor.

Since its establishment in 1979, the Islamic Republic of Iran has attempted to bring about a cultural revolution, aimed at replacing the old value system with new norms, building an ideal society based on Islamic criteria, and creating a New Islamic Person. In fact, one of the most important slogans of the postrevolutionary period has been: “Our revolution is a revolution in values.” Recognising the importance of the school in the process of character formation, the Iranian government has assigned the task of bringing about a revolution in values to the educational system.The purpose of this paper is to analyze the Islamic Republic's efforts to create a new generation of committed and doctrinaire Muslims through the study of socialization in schools. Socialization in this context is defined as “the process by which people learn to adopt the norms, values, attitudes, and behaviors accepted and practiced by the ongoing system.”

The current study will evaluate the role of ‘irfān [the inner perception of knowledge; combining elements of philosophy, theosophy, mysticism and Shi’i thought] within the Islamic Republic of Iran as a significant component of Iran’s cultural heritage. It will focus on several prominent clerics and intellectuals who represent the regime’s diverse political factions. This article will demonstrate that under the Islamic Republic, ‘irfān evolved from a marginalized area to a central phenomenon and became a tool to debate the political direction of the state and the relationship between its revolutionary and republican elements. While mysticism in the service of politics was more wide-spread among the reformist camp, ardent supporters of the regime resorted to ‘irfān to enhance an exclusive perception of authority based on the rule of the Supreme Jurist. It also created a shared spiritual basis among the Islamic State’s diverse voices. The result was a new blend between mysticism, philosophy, Western thought, politics, Islamic law, and even messianism, within an inter-connectivity between the mystical path and the Shari‘a. Consequently, a complex understanding of ‘irfān has to take into consideration the multiple fusions between Islamic mysticism and other trends and evaluate the result in a specific socio-political context.