مجموعه مقالات دومين همايش مردمسالارى دينى - جمعى از نويسندگان - الصفحة ٣٠٣
plausible conceptions of democracy.
A Conception of Religious Democracy
In brief, religious democracy from its Shia Islamic perspective can be defined as follows:
Religious democracy is a decision- making procedure, in which the relatively uncertain common concern of a community with a majority of Shia Muslims is explicated by all Shia adults with potentially equal eligibility; and furthermore conflicting individual interests of all members of the community are aggregated by the whole population of adults with equal weight within the framework of the explication phase.
To clarify: assume that an association submits freely to Islam and accepts its collection of values as a complementary source to human practical reason in determining the appropriate rules of social cooperation. This complementary source helped them expand their knowledge of the appropriate rules of social cooperation, as well as balancing conflicting or incommensurable values they know through their practical reason. Assume further that in a short period, Muslims were certain that they had access to infallible knowledge of God though His infallible Messenger and the infallible successors of His Messenger. In such an ideal situation, there seems to be no ground nor any need to democratic procedure for determining the appropriate rules of social cooperation.
Suppose that the ideal situation elapsed quickly and Muslims were deprived of such infallible knowledge of the appropriate rules of social cooperation. Suppose further that in the course of time, whilst they have maintained their commitment to Islam, Muslims have noticed that the complementary source of values have not remained satisfactorily unambiguous( the fact of relative ambiguity of inherited Islamic laws ).
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Hence, they should expiicate the Islamic values by an effort to properly comprehend them. Suppose that they have further noticed that what they have inherited as Islamic laws sufficient in a period of time, appear now partly incompatible with the requirements of a modem Islamic society, which is or should be urban, industrial, and developed with considerably expanded and complex relations. Thus, they accept that the inherited
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