A Study of the Concept of Inheritance and Its Historical Foundations in Islamic Legal System with Emphasis on Imam Khomeini's Viewpoints

Inheritance is one of the most important legal foundations in any society and it has always been under certain rules and regulations in different legal systems. These rules and regulations have been chiefly shaped up according to the conditions, time and the living place of the human beings. As a matter of fact, upon a change in the living conditions, these rules and regulations must also go under change to let the society embrace rules proportionate to its time. Therefore, the rules and regulations on inheritance have gone under drastic changes and passed behind stages of evolution in the course of time and place among the past generations and civilizations. The inheritance laws in the Arabian Peninsula has been no exception to this, i.e. they have been enacted and developed based on the rules and principles governing the entire peninsula. With the advent of Islam in that land, the rules and regulations on inheritance experienced great developments. In this paper, we have tried to review the views of jurists and Imamiyah theoreticians at law, as well as Imam Khomeini’s views on inheritance. While presenting a precise definition of the word inheritance, we have tried to clarify the rules and fundamentals serving as the basis for inheritance laws.