پیامدهای حکومتی عدالت‌محوری در حکمرانی اسلامی؛ بر پایه‌ی تحلیل متون دینی

Justice-centeredness is one of the fundamental and inseparable principles of Islamic governance, rooted in the teachings of the Noble Qur’an, the Sunnah of the Noble Prophet (peace be upon him), and the conduct of Imam ʿAlī (peace be upon him). In Islam’s political system, justice is not merely a moral virtue or spiritual ideal, but the principal indicator of legitimacy, effectiveness, and durability of the political order. The historical experience of Islamic governments—especially the ʿAlawī governance—has shown that neglect of justice in structural, political, and social arenas lays the groundwork for the erosion of public trust, the rise of corruption, and the weakening of social cohesion. Despite this central place, many contemporary studies have examined justice only in conceptual and ethical terms or within the domain of public policy, and comprehensive research that analyzes the causal chain of the governmental consequences of justice-centeredness is rarely observed. The absence of such a model has prevented policymakers and evaluators of Islamic governance from systematically measuring the impact of justice on indicators of sustainability, legitimacy, and social capital. The principal question of this study is what structural, legitimacy-related, and social consequences justice-centeredness entails in Islamic governance and how these consequences, within a coherent causal model, reinforce one another and ultimately lead to the consolidation of the political system. The main objective is to identify and explain the governmental consequences of justice-centeredness on the basis of authoritative religious sources and then to depict a causal model that shows how the realization of justice at various levels of governance results in the strengthening of political structures and public satisfaction. The subsidiary objectives are: extracting the principal components of justice-centeredness in Islamic governance from religious texts; explaining the mechanisms linking justice-centeredness to indicators of effectiveness and sustainability of the political order; briefly comparing the findings with certain Western theories of justice in governance, especially the views of John Rawls, Francis Fukuyama, and Bo Rothstein, and demonstrating the distinctiveness of the Islamic approach; and presenting a theoretical framework for assessing just governance in Islamic systems and for reinforcing indigenous policymaking. This study is a theoretical and analytical inquiry with a qualitative approach. The principal method is inferential content analysis based on data gathered from authentic Islamic sources, including the Noble Qur’an, Nahj al-Balāgha, Ghurar al-Ḥikam, Tuḥaf al-ʿUqūl, Mustadrak al-Wasāʾil, and the works of leading thinkers such as Murtaza Mutahhari and Muḥammad Bāqir al-Ṣadr. In addition, the principles of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Statement on the Second Step of the Revolution are considered complementary documents. In the research process, after coding concepts related to justice and governance, the components and mechanisms for realizing justice were extracted and depicted in a causal chain showing that each consequence provides the ground for the next. The findings reveal that justice-centeredness possesses a multi-layered driving force whose reflections appear in structural, legitimacy-related, and social arenas. At the structural and institutional level, justice, by preventing discrimination, corruption, and inequality in resource distribution, stabilizes institutions, consolidates power, and increases effectiveness; the ground for accountability and the susceptibility
of rulers to oversight is laid by justice, and meritocracy becomes a behavioral rule that enables the appointment of righteous and honest managers. In the political and legitimacy dimension, justice-centeredness, by attracting trust and reducing social resistance, increases the soft influence of the government and simultaneously strengthens divine legitimacy and popular acceptance; Qur’anic verses and the ʿAlawī conduct show that the linkage between God’s satisfaction and people’s satisfaction is embedded in the implementation of justice. In the social and communicative arena, justice-centeredness prepares the ground for social solidarity, reduction of cleavages, reinforcement of a sense of belonging to the political order, and the enhancement of social capital. The causal chain depicted in this research shows that these consequences, as a progressive cycle, reinforce each other: structural reform yields political sustainability, sustainability increases social capital, and social capital leads to greater effectiveness of structures. A comparative analysis with theories such as those of John Rawls and Francis Fukuyama shows that, although in Western thought justice is likewise a condition for governmental effectiveness and stability, in
the Islamic intellectual system justice—beyond rational functions—is grounded in divine legitimacy, moral reform, and victory over falsehood. This study, while presenting a coherent model of the governmental consequences of justice, proposes a theoretical framework for evaluating and strengthening models of Islamic governance that can serve as a basis for comparative studies and indigenous policymaking. According to the presented model, justice-centeredness generates a positive cycle: starting from structural reform, leading to political sustainability and legitimacy, and ultimately elevating social capital and national cohesion; this social capital feeds back positively into structural effectiveness and sustains the cycle. The comparative analysis showed that although in Western theories justice is presented as a condition for governmental effectiveness and stability (as in Rawls and Fukuyama), in Islamic thought justice, in addition to rational functions, rests upon divine legitimacy, social reform, and victory over falsehood.