The jurisprudential Analysis of Using filtering in Cyberspace

Cyberspace, along with important opportunities, poses security, social, and cultural threats. The Islamic Republic of Iran’s policy has sought to consider filtering as the most important means of imposing restrictions on having access to the corrupt websites which are opposed to or inconsistent with the Islamic laws and regulations. This article seeks to make a jurisprudential analysis of the issue in question, and carry out a critical assessment of jurisprudential arguments for it resulting in lending support to and bolstering the necessity of using filtering corrupt websites. Though using filtering some websites seems to be against the import of the maxim of “prohibition of detriment” or principle of “harm” and implies such detriment as inaccessibility to the possibly existing scientific information
in the website, decisions not to use filtering such websites for such reasons as religious, doctrinal, cultural, and political aberrations are opposed to the arguments for the maxim of the negation of “domination over the faithful by the faithless”, prohibition of ‘keeping misguiding books’, the rule of ‘expediency’ and that of ‘enjoining the right (good) and forbidding the wrong (evil)’. In case the argument for the necessity of using filtering conflicts with the necessity of not using filtering the aberrant websites, what is decided on is naturally in favor of something with the least harm.