Nature of Governmental Rules

This article seeks to explicate the nature of governmental rules. Hence, to define the concepts used in the article, the writer, in the first place, tries to give the literal meaning or definition of rules, government, and ruler. In the second place, in order to arrive at an all-embracing definition, he embark on giving the definitions offered by the contemporary Muslim jurisprudents and scholars for such rules and, in the third place, he puts forward various views on the nature of the governmental rules stating that these rules are not the same sort the primary real rules and secondary rules are thought to be. For, the primary and secondary rules have been directly extracted from the legal texts and are based on the essential good and badness of the rules themselves, while the governmental rules are subject to the urgent demands of the time and the place as well as the expediency or the conditions an Islamic judge should take into consideration, though this may not be substantiated by any stipulated legal texts. Furthermore, taking these governmental rules as being as transient as the secondary rules, which are subject to the expediencies or demands of the time and the place, in the sense that when there is no necessity for their existence, there would be no ground to act according to them, gives no reason to take the governmental rules as secondary rules and since it is the Saint Legislator who authenticates the governmental rules, one should consider these rules as part of legal rules (prescripts) and study them as the third sort of legal rules