The Background of the Concept of Law in the Iranian Constitutional Revolution: From Absolutist to Regulatory Law

Emergence of the concept of law in the Constitutional era should be considered as the result of intellectual endeavours of those thinkers who had striven to explain it long before the official date of the Constitutional Revolution (1906). Therefore, learning about intellectual and objective backgrounds and also about the first discussions and analyses on the nature of law will bear great insights. This paper shall deal with the development of idea of change in the political system in the pre-Constitutional time up to the Constitutional Revolution. This in fact reveals the process of emergence and evolution of the concept of law among the thinker or that era. It was not an accident that people sought a constitutional system and laws appropriate to this system. The existence of an unregulated (independent) absolute monarchy accompanied with an absolute law and then introduction of the idea of a regulated absolute monarchy along with the law as regulations were all background elements that contributed to the rise of a will for a constitutional system which in turn had occupied the mind of the main constitutional thinkers. Law for them was the law of a constitutional system. This understanding went serious changes later on.