Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

• AHMAD MAKHDOUMI ¹
• morteza javanali ²
• Seyyed Mojtaba Emami ³

¹ SHAHID BEHESHTI SCHOOL OF GOVERNANCE

² management faculty

³ Imam Sadiq University

Abstract

Governance in Western scholarship and fiqh-based system building in Islamic thought represent two contemporary efforts to address challenges in public administration. Despite increasing attention to both, each suffers from conceptual ambiguity. This study, in its first part, adopts a reductive conceptual analysis to clarify the meanings of these terms. While the literature on governance is marked by conceptual plurality, fiqh-based system building largely relies on the intellectual framework of Martyr Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr. Accordingly, the research employs a typological strategy for understanding governance and a center–periphery approach for analyzing fiqh-based system building.

In the second part, through a comparative analysis of both paradigms, the study identifies their key theoretical implications for constructing a framework of Islamic public administration. Governance offers insights such as dispersed authority, realization-oriented thinking, problem-solving, gradualism, and experiential methodology. In parallel, fiqh-based system building emphasizes rule-discovery, normative macro-rules, foundational jurisprudential principles, the role of the religious authority (wali), attention to essential human needs, and the balance of fixed and variable truths. Combined, these complementary insights can shape a coherent, practical, and value-oriented framework for Islamic public administration.

Keywords

• Fiqh-based system building
• governance
• public administration
• Islamic public administration
• Martyr Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr
• reductive conceptual analysis
• implication-based approach

Main Subjects

• Jurisprudential approach