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Abstract

This manuscript consists of an introduction, two sections and a conclusion. The first section was devoted to the definition, conditions, and reality of public interests. The following conclusions were reached.

1- A public interest was defined as an issue that was not defined or identified in the legal sources, or one which was neither approved nor rejected by legal texts.

2- Adopting public interests must be controlled by a number of conditions:

a) The public interest should be reasonable by itself. It has nothing to do with the ritual acts.

b) It should not contradict any source of legislation.

c) It should be compatible with the general purposes of Shari'a and subsumable under a generally acknowledged principle of shari'a.

3- Verifying that an issue is a public interest is a matter of reasoning and judgment in which the general principles of shari'a must be taken into account. Furthermore, the public interest must be new and not stated in any source of legislation.

The second section was devoted to the contemporary applications of public interests in four areas pertaining to the family: pre-marriage medical tests, official documentation of the marriage contract, conducting research on the phenomenon of divorce in the Islamic society, and establishing special centers for family counseling.

The findings of the research revealed that these contemporary issues were not handled in the legal texts, and thus they can be considered public interests because they do not violate any legal rule, and they serve noble purposes such as protecting the self and others, maintaining and protecting the marriage contract, and protecting people from the evils of divorce. All these are general purposes of shari'a. In conclusion, the research findings showed that using public interests is compatible with shari'a rules. In addition, the activation of public interests emphasizes the suitability of the Islamic shari'a to each time and place

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