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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Investigations And Challenges Chapter 14: The Mutual Relationship between the People and the Government (Part 5) The People Government Relationship Subjection and Domination or what? The subject of our discussion is the relationship between the people and the government in Islam. In this session, we shall examine the issue from a different angle and then spend the remaining time by entertaining questions.

In principle, the relationship between the people and the government can be conceived in different forms. Of course, these various forms are not mere mental conceptions; rather, something which existed in the annals of history and does exist more or less. One type of relationship is that the government is the master while the people are the subjects. Throughout history, most of the governments we know became dominant by force and have forced themselves on the people.

Their expectation from the people was to obey them unconditionally and unreservedly. If in some cases they used to act contrary to this expectation, it was because they wanted to win the people’s hearts and stabilize the condition of their respective countries so as to rule easily. Otherwise, their expectation has been for them to give order and the people to act upon them, and the relationship between them and the people is that of sovereign and subject.

The expression sovereign , which, in our Persian literature, is used for the government, is not inappropriate for this way of thinking. Of course, I was not able to obtain a statistical record and examine the different governments in the various parts of the world, and to see what percent of them are like that. At any rate, what we know in history is that almost all governments have been like so.

Contrary to that type of government, other inclinations can be found at the margin of history in which the case has been the opposite; that is, the people have defined their own duties, dictating their wills to the government. In other words, instead of the government imposing its orders upon the people, in this type of government it is the people that dictate the rules and regulations to the government and the government is the implementer and agent of their demands.

Of course, I am not a historian and in studying historical documents I do not know to what extent the authenticity of a certain subject is.