Quarterly Scientific Journal of Applied Ethics Studies
Year:2012 | Volume:2 | Issue:6|Papers Count:8

Islam is a religion whose essential aim is to educate faithful individuals and to build a society with a proper moral foundation and in accordance with religious precepts. An Ideal Islamic society is loaded with ethical virtues and makes no distinction between social responsibilities and religious duties. One of the important factors which is considered an essential and factual tool to create such a strong link between social and religious task and has been emphasized in Quranic teachings is the avoidance of human society from ethical vices, since an ideal Islamic society is deeply and inextricably linked to human virtues, not vices.Also promoting moral vices can cause to disrupt the relationship of man with God and interrupt the social ethical relationships between fellow human beings. Late Allamah Tabatabaie considered the ethical vices in the society a factor weakening the faith and religious beliefs which can lead to the destruction of spirituality and can act as an obstacle preventing the ideal development of morality. The author of this paper, referring to AllamahTabatabaie's views, tries to mention the most important ethical vices in human societies which are obvious barriers to the efflorescence of human being and community and emphasizes on the necessity of avoiding those vices.

Love which can be a matter of conscience is derived from cognition and is considered secondary to it. When there is no cognition, there is also no love. Certainly the love towards God and God's love towards man which is the most precious and the noblest kind of love is based on the same principle. Love of God has such an important position that is regarded as an ultimate purpose of worshiping Him. In the present paper the definition of love, the reality of God's love and hatred towards His creatures, love in the Quran and its causes, symptoms of man's love towards God and its obstacles have been discussed. The research is based on descriptive-analytic approach and follows library method.

In the culture and lifestyle of Imam Reza who is the interpreter of the revelation, all religions despite their historical demonstrations, are expressions of a single nature. However, deviation of religions from the mainstream which has been done throughout the history by the corrupt rulers has caused them to separate from each other. Today what humanity desperately needs, is interfaith dialogue and interaction among religions to reduce existing gaps and to bring together the hearts of their followers and to guide them towards salvation. Accordingly, the Quran Addressing Muhammad (S.) says: "We've raised you for the salvation of all humanity," on the other hand one of the unique features of Islam, is its universality which makes it to belong to all human beings of every race and ritual. During the time when Imam Reza was selected as a crown prince he took an influential step to resolve differences among religions and pointed out the present weaknesses in the distorted religions. He can be identified as one of the figures who were pioneers in the practice of dialogue among religions in Islamic Society. The great examples of such dialogues are his debates with Jathliq, Rasoljalut, Hebaz, UmranSahebi and some other scholars of other religions.Using a descriptive-analytic method, the author has tried to investigate the approach taken by Imam while discussing with the adherents of other religions.

Islam as the ultimate religion of God and the Prophet Muhammad as the last Prophet and the Imams, have all regarded a high position for ethics which can help stabilize social relations. Imam Reza by combining two major aspects of social life, namely ethics and politics, offered a clear picture of the need to apply ethics-based methods in political power, especially within the leadership of the Muslim community.In this paper, this kind of attitude to politics is named ethical policies and has been tried to elaborate on the main components and characteristics of this approach from the views of Imam Reza.

Ghazali's practical wisdom is formed based on the notion of "the knowledge of religion" and is derived form his own mystical interpretation of religious law. By designing this kind of practical wisdom, Ghazali tries to cure and restore ethical disorders of his community and find out some mechanisms to develop individual moral excellence, home management and civic policies. This paper is an attempt to clarify the outline principles of Ghazali's special practical wisdom.

Among the issues put forward in the field of cognition and understanding of religious texts, the influence of hidden factors on the acquisition of knowledge and thought is of great importance. The impact of gender in understanding of the text is one of the issues that has been seriously pursued in recent decades. This is because in the process of gaining knowledge, masculine experience, attitude, interest and qualities are usually noted while the feminine ones are totally ignored. With the advent of feministic ideas, the subject of religious perception encountered some challenges from feminists who were demanding the equal rights for women in interpreting religious texts and even offered woman-centered reading of such texts.Among the pioneers of this thought in Islam, is Ms. AminaWadud an African American convert to Islam who has considered Qur'an as a moral book and referred to it as a main focus of his work. She claims that Islamic teachings have not been practiced in the past centuries and the justice expected and intended by Islam was ignored just because of the masculine interpretation of Quran and the dominance of masculine views in the Muslim societies. Ms. Wadud bases her gender demands on Quran and claims that based on Quranic view justice, equality and dignity are all God's gifts to humanity and women should not be deprived from it. Her feminine reading of Quran has been reflected in a book called "Quran and Women: reading Quran through feminine view".

This article tries to investigate human duties toward others according to Kant's thought and Islamic tradition. Therefore, concepts like respecting the rights of others or "Hagh al-Nas", benevolence, friendship, jealousy and so on will be inspected based on the two different approaches, namely the Kantian view and Islamic traditionin a comparative method. Considering these two views, one can conclude that because the Kantian view towards man's duties is based on Humanistic philosophy while in Islamic tradition all duties are looked upon from the perspective of religion and divinity, the two views are totally different and opposing. Of course as based on both Islamic and Kantian views, there is no absolute separation between religion and morality; it is possible to put these apparently contradictory views together. In this paper we outline some examples of human obligations to others, and then emphasize the similarities of these two traditions in their approaches towards the obligations.

KhajeNasir al-Din al-Tusi (597-627 AH) composed two different works about Ethics. One is known as Akhlagh-e Muhtashemi and the other, which was written after the first, is called Akhlagh-e Naseri. The present paper seeks to compare these two works using the descriptive-analytic method and points out the similarities and differences of these two books in form, style, prose and content.