ISLAMIC REVOLUTION STUDIES
Year:2013 | Volume:10 | Issue:32|Papers Count:13

An Islamic society can’t have such freedoms as west and east and found its socio-political system upon them. Rather it should base its road map on acceptable Islamic foundations in order to provide political freedoms. It should also direct its desirable subsystem in the field of political freedoms in line with macro policies for the socio-political system. Obviously this argument will lead to different approaches in fundamental issues of any political system such as freedom of speech, elections, political participation, factions etc. and creates different scopes, criteria and instances in these fields, western or eastern. This study is about to investigate foundations of freedom through the abovementioned interpretation considering Islamic teachings while emphasizing on ayatollah Khamenei’s viewpoints.

In economic arena, Islamic republic of Iran is facing issues and concepts never experienced before, theoretically or practically, by anyone anywhere. Therefore Islamic republic of Iran is itself obliged to innovate, theorize and create its own models in these novel economic situations. Among these concepts is resistance economy. Having been proposed by supreme leader, it includes a large number of subjects. Therefore to clarify the scope of resistance economy it is necessary to identify various aspects of the subject and classify different subjects based on their priority. Terminologically speaking, this phase is called the preparation of economy’s blueprint. Having analyzed supreme leader’s speeches and having applied Grounded Theory, this study tries to extract conceptual model of his speeches regarding different aspects, characteristics and necessities of resistance economy.

The role of religious teachings in the health of elections, based on late Imam Khomeini and ayatollah Khamenei’s viewpoints who believe it is religiously obligatory to participate in elections and consider healthy and free Elections as the expedience of the system and its growth is outstanding and can be traced in at least three axels as following: correcting the attitudes and creating new ones, domination of ethics and system of values and designing a viable communicative system.To create new attitudes, Islamic teachings depict participation in elections as a religious duty and obligation not a power tool. For domination of ethics and system of values it suggests trust building and proving the value capability meaning professional competence and ethical qualification. For a viable communicative system, presence of religion and its teachings lead to a reasonable interaction, spiritual influence, inclination toward expedience and spiritual growth that are among the intellectual foundations in elections. Presence of religion in these aspects totally guarantees the health of elections.

This paper tries to study the role of political leadership and how it influenced victories and failures during history. Therefore, in a journey through fluctuating Iranian history, four prominent and influential wars of past two centuries -initially Iran-Russia war and finally Iran-Iraq war- have been studied. While comparing Iran’s political leadership in these wars and their consequences, this question has been duly answered: what were the reasons of Iran’s failures in three wars during Qajar dynasty and desired results of Iran-Iraq war?

With the victory of Islamic revolution, Iran’s inclination toward the application of principlist attitudes in tension filled international arenas as a battlefield to secure national interests based on usually material attitudes created different challenges for Islamic republic of Iran. To resolve problems that occurred in domestic and foreign arenas, Imam Khomeini considered efforts to preserve Islamic state essential applying his epistemological system and method of ijtihad [the process of making a legal decision by independent interpretation of the legal sources, the Qur’an and the Sunnah] with an emphasis on the role of variables of “time” and “place” in inferring rulings related to political actions. For this end, he proposed “system preservation” attitude as an instance for the necessity of preparing any requirement to implement God’s intentions as the founder of Islamic shari’a [Islamic law]. The application of “system preservation” strategy to preserve Islamic republic of Iran paved the way to increase Iran’s management capabilities both in domestic and international arenas and to confront the challenges. It also helped intelligently implement Islamic state’s principlist attitudes in different conditions according to time and place.

In its three stages namely development, consolidation and expansion, Islamic revolution has walked in the path of feqh. In the development stage it applied traditional feqh, in the consolidations stage it used dynamic feqh and currently i.e. the expansion stage from country and Islamic state to "Islamic civilization" it requires state feqh. This study explains the abovementioned stages and argues the necessity to utilize state feqh in transition from consolidation stage to expansion stage. Finally it examines the condition of feqh in the development and consolidation stage and draws the outlines of transition from the current conditions to the expansion of revolution and its required software.

One of the important gaps in the syllabus of Islamic thought courses in universities despite almost three decades of Islamic Thought departments’ activities is to conduct researches and design and clarify desired objectives for these courses that both complies with major policies of the country in this regard and is accepted by experts and university students according to current needs of the society. Having studied major policies of the country written down in different documents, we identified desired objectives. Then data were classified and divided into 385 initial codes. These desired objectives were collected and presented through categorization and themes based on research resources in eight generic fields. Since the research was really lengthy and expansive the validity of the desired objectives extracted through Delphi method, both from individuals and groups, and semi-structured interviews from experts and professors as well as questionnaires filled by university students of Islamic thought courses will be presented in a separated article.

Among the objectives of western soft war is to marginalize national and religious cultures and facilitate the domination of liberal democracy in the globalization process as well as world domination. The main axis of soft war is to provoke cultural, social and political forces in countries with intellectual, factional and methodical rifts so that the opposition can transfer the components of its dispute to political structure and widen the structural gaps. Western soft war has manifested itself in the creation of crises in the fields of beliefs, culture, ethics and society in order to weaken Islamic republic of Iran’s legitimacy and popularity. Younger generation, vulnerable people, women, ethnic groups, ethical and social problems, opposition to welayate faqih, the spread of pseudo-mysticisms and similar issues have been the focus of western soft war agents who are trying to question the bases of Iranian identity and threaten legitimacy and popularity of Islamic republic of Iran.

Due to its cultural capacities, Islamic revolution of Iran has challenged US interests in Islamic world especially the sensitive area of middle-east through the application of cultural power and soft power earlier than US. Islamic awakening, political and revolutionary Islam which has spread all over Arab Countries in middle-east and north Africa is an outcome of methods, tools and soft power applied by Iran through its culture and its religious as well as revolutionary ideology. This study specifically explains cultural and soft capacities, methods and tools of both sides and offers the prospects of this confrontation.

This article mainly focuses on how and with the aid of what media Islamic revolution’s leadership spread revolution’s ideology among the masses and when necessary he mobilized and organized people. To address this question McLuhan’s classification of media into hot and cool has been applied to study the influence of media by Imam Khomeini and acceleration of Islamic revolution’s victory. Having analyzed media used by revolution’s leaders especially Imam Khomeini and having compared them to characteristics mentioned by McLuhan in his classification of media into hot and cool, we can figure out revolution leaders especially Imam Khomeini’s insight in selecting the kind of media and the method to use them in order to spread revolution’s ideology and mobilize masses with regard to revolutionary conditions of the society and political status of Pahlavi regime.