The Jurisprudential Responsibility of the Islamic Ruler in Educational Regulation of the Digital Space, and the Consequences of Leaving Social Moral Education Unregulated

The rapid transformations of the digital space in recent decades have led to the formation of a “new social field” in which norms, values, and patterns of moral action are continuously produced, reproduced, or weakened. In this arena, social moral education is no longer confined to traditional institutions such as the family and the school; rather, it is strongly shaped by media policies, platform architectures, and the governance mechanisms of the digital space. Given that, in a significant portion of contemporary jurisprudential (fiqh) literature, the issue of social morality is largely analyzed at the level of individual exhortations or personal virtues, and that the jurisprudential responsibility of the Islamic ruler for the educational regulation of the digital space has received comparatively little systematic attention, this article—adopting a social-fiqh approach and employing an analytical–ijtihādī method—seeks to answer the following questions: first, what is the Islamic ruler’s jurisprudential responsibility with respect to teaching and institutionalizing social morality in the digital space? Second, what jurisprudential and social consequences would follow from leaving this domain unregulated? To this end, the authors, through a re-reading of the foundations of Imāmī (Twelver Shīʿī) jurisprudence—especially the theory of Wilāyat al-faqīh (Guardianship of the Jurist), the concept of ḥisbah, and the legal maxim of the obligation to preserve the social order [i.e. the Establishment] (wujūb ḥifẓ al-niẓām)—argue that the digital space, as an integral component of contemporary social life, cannot be placed outside the scope of governmental responsibilities. The findings indicate that social morality in the digital space, due to its direct linkage with public order, human dignity, and social stability, possesses a nature that transcends individual morality. Moreover, leaving social moral education in this space unregulated can lead to the weakening of norm-formation processes, an increase in moral harms, and disruption of the social order. On the basis of jurisprudential principles, the Islamic ruler possesses not only the authority but also the duty to undertake educational regulation of this domain. Such educational regulation, however, is not reducible to coercive control or censorship; rather, it is articulated as a set of preventive, supportive, and institutional policies aimed at guiding social morality in the digital space. By proposing a jurisprudential model for the educational regulation of the digital space, we likewise seek to show that social fiqh can provide an effective framework for linking the foundations of Imāmī jurisprudence with the requirements of ethical governance in the digital age, and for preventing social morality from being reduced to individual recommendations or from being detached from governmental responsibility.