A Critical Restudy of the Condition of “Religious Maturity Age” for a Person Who Is Commanded to Do Good and Prohibited from Doing Evil with Emphasis on Imam Khomeini's Viewpoints

Abstract

One of the conditions mentioned for the person who is commanded to do good and is prohibited from doing evil is the condition of reaching the religious maturity age, which means whether a person who is commanded to do good and prohibited from doing evil must have reached the age of religious maturity or not. There are five theories about this issue. Imam Khomeini offers a new approach to this issue: Although a religiously immature person is commanded to do good and prohibited from doing evil – the Legislator never approves of doing evil or leaving good by anybody – this commanding the good and prohibiting the evil is not within the category of the religious decree of commanding the good and prohibiting the evil, rather it is because of the Legislator’s emphasis on doing or leaving certain acts. The data was collected from the texts on different approaches to this issue and their arguments were analyzed through descriptive-analytical method. The findings of the research show that firstly, the age of maturity is the condition for the person who is commanded to do the good and prohibited from doing evil. Secondly, the reasons for asking the religiously immature persons to do the good and avoid evil in some cases are just educational and not necessarily jurisprudential and in some other cases they are related to the encroachment upon the people’s rights that children are prohibited from doing it.

Keywords

• religious maturity age
• person commanded to do good
• person prohibited from doing evil
• person commanding the good
• person prohibiting evil
• imam khomeini