School
Islamic jurisprudence
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If consent of the governed is the newcomer, what did legitimacy rest on before it?
I teach at a Māori-language school, and my students are learning about government this term. I showed them a comparative table of answers to the question "how should we be governed?" across many traditions: Greek, Chinese, Indian, Islamic, European. The thing that…
Started by Aroha Tipene5 replies224 views -
Is the ban on riba about bad outcomes, or about the form a transaction may take?
I do tax returns for small businesses in Surrey, British Columbia, and many of my clients are Muslim. Several of them won't take a conventional loan. One explained that it's not because the interest rate is too high; it's that a guaranteed…
Started by Harpreet Kaur Grewal4 replies146 views -
Zakat is a claim on wealth, not a gift. What does that do to the charity versus justice debate?
Many debates about distributive justice I read, especially in English, assume a sharp line: justice is what can be demanded and enforced; charity is good but optional, a gift. Taxes for the first, donations for the second. Zakat doesn't sit comfortably on…
Started by Nur Aisyah Rahman5 replies221 views -
Whoever deploys an automated decision system should answer for its harms, fault or no fault
Take the standard case. A bank uses an automated system to assess loans. A creditworthy applicant is refused. The refusal rests on correlations in the training data that no engineer chose and nobody can fully reconstruct. Who answers for it? The engineers…
Started by Hamza Qureshi7 replies229 views -
If nobody deserves punishment, could a court actually run on Pereboom’s quarantine model?
I practise criminal and constitutional law in Lahore. I have been reading Derk Pereboom, who argues that free will in the sense needed for basic desert does not exist, whether determinism is true or not. He does not conclude that we must…
Started by Hamza Qureshi5 replies227 views -
Slippery-slope arguments in medicine are usually predictions, not fallacies
I was a GP in Leith for thirty-four years. Medicine runs on slippery-slope reasoning, and most of it is sound. A simple case. A patient with a cold asks for antibiotics. If I prescribe "just this once", I have taught them that…
Started by Alistair Gow6 replies196 views -
Reading group: al-Mawardi’s Ordinances of Government, on the conditions of legitimate rule
Al-Mawardi (972–1058) was a Shafi'i jurist and judge in Baghdad at a strange moment: the Abbasid caliph was the recognised head of the community, while real military power in the city belonged for most of his life to the Buyid emirs. His…
Started by Layla Haddad5 replies256 views -
Every legal code I know contradicts itself somewhere, and courts still function
I practise at the Lahore High Court. Every legal system I know contains provisions that conflict: a later statute that cuts across an earlier one, a general rule and a specific exception that both seem to apply, a constitutional provision in tension…
Started by Hamza Qureshi5 replies210 views -
Dharma, li, sharia, natural law: four words English keeps flattening into “duty” or “law”
I tutor engineering students in an evening course on Indian philosophy, and last week one of them asked a good question: “If dharma is not duty, what is it like? Is there anything in other cultures that works the same way?” I…
Started by Meera Kulkarni5 replies278 views -
When should someone who isn’t an expert simply defer? What did al-Ghazālī say?
As a data analyst I defer to experts all day: to doctors about my health, to engineers about the bridges I drive over, to the people who built the statistical libraries I use. I can't check them. I'd like to understand when…
Started by Nur Aisyah Rahman4 replies114 views -
A verdict that was right by accident: did the court know he was guilty?
Many years ago, early in my time as a magistrate, I convicted a young man of a burglary largely on the identification of one witness. The identification was confident, the defence was weak, and I was satisfied. Some years later it emerged,…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan5 replies211 views -
Usul al-fiqh and Dworkin’s integrity: two ways of saying law is more than its rules
I read Iqbal and Hart side by side for a living, more or less, and lately I have been adding Dworkin and al-Shafi'i to the pile. I want to test a comparison that I find tempting and suspect is partly false. Dworkin…
Started by Hamza Qureshi5 replies186 views -
Thirty-one years of deciding what is ‘reasonable’, and no degrees of truth in sight
I spent thirty-one years on the bench in Punjab, the last ten as a sessions judge. A large part of the work was applying words that have no sharp edges: "reasonable doubt", "sudden provocation", "sufficient cause", "unsound mind". Now I read that…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan5 replies150 views -
The five rulings, from obligatory to forbidden: why the middle categories are not just extra boxes
Standard deontic logic has three basic statuses: obligatory, forbidden, and permitted. Anything neither obligatory nor forbidden is simply permitted, and that's the end of it. Islamic jurisprudence has five rulings (al-aḥkām al-khamsa). An act is obligatory (wājib), recommended (mandūb), permissible (mubāḥ), disliked…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan5 replies166 views -
Keeping the losing opinion on the page: is disagreement inside a tradition as deep as disagreement between traditions?
In my Tuesday Talmud class we recently read the story in tractate Eruvin about the houses of Hillel and Shammai, who argued for years until a heavenly voice declared that "these and these are the words of the living God", and that…
Started by Rabbi Eliana Gutman5 replies191 views -
How does Islamic legal reasoning decide on a financial product that no text mentions?
I work with data at a bank in Kuala Lumpur, and our product team is looking at a "buy now, pay later" service. Inevitably someone asked whether it's halal. Someone else said, a bit dismissively, that the Qur'an and hadith obviously don't…
Started by Nur Aisyah Rahman5 replies179 views -
Why did the rabbis write down the opinions they voted against?
I teach a Talmud class on Tuesday nights, and every year someone new asks the same thing: why does the text keep the losing side? When a law is decided, why preserve, often at length, the arguments of the sages who lost?…
Started by Rabbi Eliana Gutman7 replies310 views -
Al-Shaybani’s siyar and the scholastics reached civilian immunity separately
In retirement I have been reading Majid Khadduri's 1966 translation of al-Shaybani's siyar, published as The Islamic Law of Nations. Al-Shaybani (749–805) was a student of Abu Hanifa, and his work on the siyar is one of the earliest systematic treatments of…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan5 replies126 views -
‘Illa, kāraṇa, gù: what each tradition’s word for ’cause’ lets it ask
I research classical Arabic philosophy in Beirut, and I've been thinking about how the translators of the ninth and tenth centuries handled Aristotle's aitia. They used 'illa and sabab, and here is the interesting part: 'illa already had, or soon acquired, a…
Started by Layla Haddad6 replies246 views -
Thirty-one years on the bench: legal causation is not physical causation, and should not be
I was a judge for thirty-one years in Pakistan, the last ten as a sessions judge. In retirement I am reading the jurisprudence I skimmed as a young lawyer, and causation is where philosophy and my old courtroom meet most uncomfortably. Every…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan4 replies228 views -
Outside a courtroom, who should carry the burden of proof?
In court the burden of proof is fixed by rules. In a criminal case the prosecution must prove guilt beyond reasonable doubt; in a civil case the claimant must win on the balance of probabilities. Islamic law has a well-known maxim to…
Started by Hamza Qureshi6 replies134 views -
Accident or intent: how should a court decide what someone actually did?
I spent thirty-one years on the bench, the last ten as a sessions judge. The cases that kept me awake were not the ones where we doubted who struck the blow. They were the ones where we knew exactly what happened physically,…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan4 replies268 views -
Austin says a vow on stage is void. The jurists said some words bind even in jest. Who is right?
I sat as a sessions judge in Lahore for many years. Since retiring I have been reading Austin, and one of his remarks keeps returning me to my old law books. Austin says a performative is "hollow" when said by an actor…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan4 replies118 views -
Qiyās, kal va-chomer and legal analogy: defeasible reasoning with centuries of rules
I spent thirty-one years on the bench in Punjab. The reasoning I used most was neither deduction nor statistics. It was analogy: this case resembles that one in the respect that matters, so it should be decided the same way. Islamic jurisprudence…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan5 replies275 views -
Shah Waliullah
Shah Waliullah of Delhi was an Indian Muslim scholar, jurist and reformer who studied in Mecca and Medina before returning to teach in Delhi.…
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Ibn Hazm
Ibn Hazm was an Andalusian poet, theologian, jurist and historian of religions, born in Córdoba during the last decades of the Umayyad caliphate. A…
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Al-Mawardi
Abu al-Hasan al-Mawardi was a Shafi'i jurist and judge in Basra and Baghdad, serving the Abbasid caliphs during a period when real power lay…
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Al-Shafi’i
Muhammad ibn Idris al-Shafi'i was a jurist who studied in Mecca and Medina, taught in Baghdad and spent his last years in Egypt. The…
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Al-Shatibi
Abu Ishaq al-Shatibi was a Maliki jurist of Nasrid Granada. In al-Muwāfaqāt he developed the theory of the objectives of the law (maqāṣid al-sharīʿa),…
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Al-Shaybani
Muhammad ibn al-Hasan al-Shaybani was a jurist of Kufa and Baghdad, a student of Abu Hanifa and one of the principal architects of the…