۱.
During the struggle against the Qajar tyranny, struggling leaders went to the Shah Abdul Azim Shrine to hold a sit-in against the Shah Mosque Case and foot whipping of Tehran sugar merchants. The demonstrators in Paragraph 4 of their demands, as mentioned by Nazem al-Islam Kermani, the initial demands of refugees , called for the establishment of a justice system. According to this report, and many other evidences, justice, always has been a lasting and permanent matter for the Iranian society. Recent surveys show that justice should still be considered as one of the main demands of the Iranian society. The debate about justice and social movements is constantly changing, and thinkers in this area are constantly revising their ideas. The aim of this study is to elaborate these changes and to discuss the place of justice in new social movements that refers to a range of collective actions with purpose of changing in one or all of the institutions. The emergence of new social movements brought about new ways of expressing demands and protests, and a wide range of collective behavior forms, which, in terms of goals, nature and method of struggle, had a fundamental difference with earlier movements. In fact, with the advent of modernity, the calculations of traditional society were collapsed and, with the advent of postmodernity, new demands were created largely due to development of higher education and autonomy of individuals. Accordingly, new social movements emerged in a broader context of discourses, subcultures, ideological straggle, and identity diversity, and were spread in the form of new discourses.
۲.
One of the challenges of the Islamic Republic of Iran during her forty years since the 1979 revolution is the bewilderment for the realization of social justice. Although it is argued that the lack of social justice during the Pahlavi regime finally resulted in the Islamic Revolution, failure in the improvement of social justice indices after the revolution, especially after the end of the war between Iran and Iraq in 1988, has resulted in governance policies that are contrary to social justice. Given that social justice in Iran is not desirable and the current situation in Iran, forty years after the revolution, does not resemble much the ideals of the revolutionary leaders for establishing social justice, the present article, by referring to reliable data and using analytical-descriptive method, attempts to show that the governance practices in Iran have not been able to realize social justice which entails taking into consideration the successful international experiences and implementation of the good governance practices.
۳.
“You are able to consume everything but your bodies…”. This stereotypic phrase is a very repetitive one, endorsed in most of the workshops on “body and archaeology”. The workshops, I am holding for three years is various cities of Iran are actually based on Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed and the very concept of Docile Bodies of Michael Foucault. My very goal in these series of workshops is to clarify the process of oppression for students of anthropology and social sciences using a method more than describing the theoretical dilemma. Over the last couple of years, it has been more clarified to me that over half of the youths attending the workshops have no motivation to move or present their body and voice abilities. They prefer to remain the silent audiences of an instructor’s monologue. The rate of such a desire increases in larger cities representing the increasing rate of body control. To manage Boal’s plays, I usually conduct the machine play to warm up minds but surprisingly, more I practice, more these are female participants who share their experiences of body oppression while male students remain silent. Is there any recognized pattern which shapes their exception of presenting the bodies? Are they fearful of losing their social agency towards playing new Avant-garde roles? I believe that the answer is positive. There are patterns of docile bodies which are objectively observable in the process of playing Theater of the Oppressed in Iran and mostly these patterns are gender-based. In this article, I intend to describe the body patterns derived from the workshops on Body and Archaeology in order to a better understanding of docile bodies based on acts and practices.
۴.
In this article, it will be shown that philosophers/theoreticians of justice, such as John Rawls, are engaged in a kind of performative contradiction, since despite their implicit call for justice, their mere academic activities in developing a theory of justice, does not really help the cause of justice in society. Then by referring to thoughts of Heidegger, Levinas, and Nietzsche, among others, it will be shown that although the struggle to achieve social justice is necessary and has the highest priority, it is an impossible task; and yet human beings are existentially obliged to engage in this unavoidable task. Finally, it will be shown as why this "task of social justice" will be best achieved as, what could be called, "authentic development" or horizontal development at the bottom, and playing chess with the powers that be. In defining "authentic development," it will be compared with what Denis Goulet calls by the same name; where he defines the desired development with its results, rather than its process.
۵.
Mir Sayyid Ali Hamadani is a great Muslim mystic of the 8 th century AH (14 th century AD). He has left several manuscripts focusing on mystical teachings and we can recognize his attitude toward the issue of justice in these works. Therefore, the main question of this article is: what is the relationship between mysticism and justice in the political thought of Mir Sayyid Ali Hamadani? Our hypothesis is that, there is a positive longitudinal relationship between mysticism and justice in the thought of Hamadani. According to the foundations of his ontology and anthropology and his definition of mysticism and human’s felicity, the issue of justice itself is one of the pillars of the voyage toward God. The data of this research are gathered by the library method. Also, we have used Abd al-Qahir Jurjani's method The Theory of Order, to obtain an integrated knowledge about various components of Hamadani's thought as well as Franklin Le Van Baumer’s The Climate of Opinion, to deepen the historical aspects of our research. Findings of this research show that by using The Theory of Order, we can clearly see the link between mysticism and justice in Hamadani's thought. Moreover, the study of the intellectual atmosphere of the time shows that majority of Muslim mystics, considered the issue of justice as one of their teachings.
۶.
This article examines the performance of justice in Qajar Iranian society (1789-1906) and the ways in which social hierarchies operated in the determination of justice. As in ancient or medieval European society, people were not considered equal before the law. Men were treated differently from women, while non-Muslims were subject to substantially different expectations and punishments. Sunnis and those belonging to other Shi’i schools of Islam such as the Isma‘ilis and Zaidis had fewer rights than Twelver Shi’is in legal disputes and were subject to more restrictions. But even men belonging to Twelver Shi’ism, the largest branch of Shi’ism and a majority of Iranian, were not equal before the law. In addition, partly because of the duality between ‘urfi customary law and sharia religious law, and party because of clerical power, laws were neither unanimous nor centralized, which meant justice was often arbitrary. Qajar justice commonly practiced corporeal punishment and executions, usually performed in public, and these served as a means of both chastising the people and entertaining them. Finally, the institution of slavery remained in force. Slaves, as moveable properties, occupied a position between humans and commodities and were subject to very different sets of regulations and punishments. One consequence of this patch quilt of laws was that European powers, starting in the Safavid era, demanded the right to adjudicate legal disputes between their citizens who resided in Iran and the local populace. These agreements, which were known as capitulation treaties, offered protection to persecuted minorities of Iran and runaway slaves. But they also allowed foreign powers to become involved in Iran’s domestic affairs and to monitor maritime trade in the Persian Gulf. All of these social hierarchies would be questioned in the course of the 1906 Constitutional Revolution and new laws would be promulgated in the hopes of creating a modern state with equal rights for citizens.
