An Investigation into Kefa’at in Religion from the Perspective of the Quran, Narrations, Islamic Jurisprudence and Law With an Emphasis on Islamic Penal Codes of 1991 and 2013

The Islamic Penal Code adopted in 2013 on the issue of the kefa’at (sufficiency of reasons) of murderer and the murdered in religion has undergone some changes in comparison to the Islamic Penal Code of 2001. The legislator's approach in the new law is to remove the ambiguities of the former one about the issue in question and, therefore, in Articles 301, 310 and 311 of the new law, many of the assumptions that had been neglected in the former law have been addressed and explicitly resolved while the former law had made general reference to the equality of murderer and the murdered in religion only in Articles 207, 209 and 210, and many assumptions had not been considered or were ambiguous in it. Of course, there are some assumptions which have not been taken into account in the new law either. Hence, in this article, an attempt is made to analyze the jurisprudential and legal foundations of all the changes made in the new law about the issue in question by exploring the narrations from Ahl al-Bayt (a.s.) as well as the opinions of great jurists, while explaining the strengths and weaknesses of the new law and paving the way for the elimination of its weaknesses by the legislature.