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What are the “objectives of the law” (maqāṣid) that people keep mentioning, and why do they matter?

Fajar Nugroho Fellow
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LawIslamicIslamic jurisprudenceAl-GhazaliAl-Shatibi#beginner#maqasid#objectives-of-the-law#usul-al-fiqh
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In a discussion at our mosque youth group, one speaker kept saying that a ruling has to be understood "through the maqāṣid", the objectives or purposes of the sharia. Another person said this is exactly how people end up ignoring the texts. They argued for half an hour and I understood about a third.

I've read a bit of al-Ghazālī, so I recognise his name in this, but I don't know what he actually said about it.

Could someone explain, for a beginner:

  1. What are the maqāṣid, and who came up with the idea?
  2. How are they supposed to be used when someone is working out a ruling?
  3. Why does the second person at my youth group find it dangerous?
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3 answers

  1. Nur Aisyah Rahman

    Fellow

    Here is the outline as I learned it.

    1. What they are. The idea is that the law as a whole serves purposes, and that the purposes can be named. Al-Ghazālī, building on his teacher al-Juwaynī, listed five "necessities" that the law protects: religion, life, intellect, lineage and property. Below the necessities come "needs", things that remove hardship, and then "embellishments", things that refine life. Al-Shāṭibī, a fourteenth-century jurist in Granada, later made the objectives the organising idea of a whole theory of law rather than one tool among many.

    2. How they're used. Mostly in cases the texts don't address directly, and in choosing between interpretations. If two readings are possible, the one that better serves the protection of life, say, has a claim to be preferred.

    3. Why it worries people. Because "the purpose of the law" can become a way of arguing past what the texts actually say. If I can always say "the real objective is X", I can make the law say almost anything. Defenders reply that the objectives were themselves derived from the texts, by reading across many rulings, so they are a discipline, not an escape from one.

  2. Youssef Berrada

    Fellow

    Aisyah's summary is good. I would only add a historian's note. The idea is old, but it became very popular again in the twentieth century, when reformers in North Africa and elsewhere, the Tunisian scholar Ibn ʿĀshūr among them, used it to think about modern institutions the classical texts never imagined.

    So when your two speakers argue, they are partly arguing about the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, not only about al-Ghazālī. That might explain why it took half an hour.

  3. Fajar Nugroho

    Fellow

    This helps a lot. So the five necessities are like a map of what the law is for, and the argument is about whether you're allowed to steer by the map when the road signs are unclear, or only when they're missing.

    I'll go back next week with that question. It sounds less like a fight when you put it that way.