The scholarly meeting of “Rent Seeking Fiqh” was held with the presentation of Hujjat al-Islam wa al-Muslimin Dr. Muhammad Reda Yusufi.

At the meeting, Dr. Yusufi pointed out that the concept of rent seeking is new even in Iran’s legal texts, emphasized the necessity and importance of the thematics of this discussion and addressed the thematics of this concept.  According to him, “rent seeking is a borrowed word in our country that has been misunderstood and this is why a wrong mentality has been formed towards the concept of rent seeking…  If this does not happen, we will suffer a misunderstanding, and therefore someone who is in the position of jurisprudence will suffer a misunderstanding, which we see as an example in the discussion of money making in the field of traditional jurisprudence and theology.

According to him, “rent seeking can have two types of relationship with jurisprudence, one type is that these things that we mentioned are the cause of rent seeking in the economy of our country, our existing jurisprudence with these Shari’ah rulings which are the ijtihads that we have today . Does this jurisprudence lead to strengthening the causes of rent seeking?  Or that these lead to its weakening?  That is, the jurisprudence that we have today, the ijtihads that we have, will this lead to the weakening of the causes of rent seeking in the country?  Or that it can strengthen it?  We call this jurisprudence of rent seeking or rent-weakening jurisprudence.  In this way, we can clarify our duty with jurisprudence.”

Also, “another thing is that we present the same issues we talked about to jurisprudence, that is, we state the rulings on assignments.  Let’s talk about the types of transfers and say one by one that from a jurisprudential point of view, for example, does it have to be an auction?  Or if we specifically give such and such a factory to a seminary in Isfahan, for example, give it to such and such a seminary, give it to the such and such charity, give it to so and so, what is the ruling on this?”

It is worth mentioning that this meeting was held on Monday, 20 November 2023 with the presence of researchers at the Research Institute of Contemporary Jurisprudence.