The Source of Overseeing Shari ah in the Legislative System of the Islamic Republic of Iran

Articles 4, 72, 91, 94, and 96 of the Constitution make explicit the sources of the rules and regulations which are governing the Islamic Republic of Iran with regard to the necessity of their being based on Islamic law. In these articles, however, different terms and expressions are used. According to the article 4 of the Constitution, all the ‘laws and regulations have to be based on Islamic criteria’, whereas according to the article 96 of the Constitution, the idea that Islamic law supervises the rules and regulations is expressed by using the expression“compatibility of the legislation [passed by the Islamic Consultative Assembly] with the laws of Islam”. Some jurists think that the aforementioned expressions used in the Constitution do not correspond to one another. Other jurists see that the expressions‘Islamic criteria’ and ‘laws of Islam’ are general concepts and hence inaccurate. Therefore, a probing look at the meaning of the already mentioned expressions shows that the application of these two expressions‘Islamic criteria’ and ‘laws of Islam’ which seem to be different, convey the same idea and come to the same result and so no trace of incongruityor inconsistency can be detected in the articles of the Constitution.