General criminal law, along with specific criminal law and criminal procedure, is one of the three main branches of criminal law knowledge. This branch of criminal law contains various issues that can be divided into two parts: The first and most general part of criminal law deals with rules that do not include specific crimes and encompass a number of crimes and sometimes all crimes such as those relating to the general elements of crime, criminal liability terms, and the rules governing punishments.
The other part contains a backward view to the law of justice and is a kind of "criminal legal studies" dealing with the sources of criminal law, its relationship with other sciences, the goals of criminal law, the characteristics of criminal systems, and so on.
Islam, as a comprehensive school, embraces the essential principles of collective and individual life and has extensive criminal rules in both parts of the general criminal law, especially the first part. On the one hand, the present book addresses the rules of criminal law from the perspective of the positive law and introduces the views of Islam regarding such rules. In fact, this book adopts a comparative approach to positive laws and Fiqh.