Measuring the Relationship between Laws and Religious Prescriptions in the Islamic Republic of Iran

With the advances which occurred in the different aspects of life and emergence of the conditions that did not exist at the time of the proclamation of religion, it is felt that there is an increasing need for legislation. In the Age of Occultation and with the closure of the doors of religious science, making laws, acquiring knowledge of religion and establishing shar‟i injunctions relating to novelties have been entrusted to religious jurists. Likewise, now that a Shiite Islamic government has come to existence after many years, there is a greater need to enforce laws laid down by Islamic law and formulate laws on the newly-raised issues by religious jurists. The main question raised by this research is about how to establish interaction between law and Sharia. The author expounds this question, using an analytical and descriptive method. Due to the importance of making a special law for the Islamic State, fiqh and law scholars have decided to solve the problem of the legality of the laws approved by the jurists of the Guardian Council by examining their compatibility with Sharia. The findings of the study can be summarized as follows: a. due to the extensive range of the issues of the day and the need to adopt new laws, the laws which are adopted after Ijtihad-based examination, have to be in accord with the religion of Islam. For this reason, the religious jurists of the Guardian Council sometimes find that the laws which the Islamic Consultative Assembly sends to them for approval are not in accord with Sharia and so they return them to the Islamic Consultative Assembly for remedying defects in them; b. some laws are no longer effective and there is a need to enact newer laws; and c. on inquiry, some laws are found incompatible with Islam and they have to be set right.