School
Islamic jurisprudence
Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) is the study of Islamic law and of how its rulings are derived from the Qur'an, the Sunna, consensus and analogy.
Al-Shafi’i (767–820) gave its legal theory (usul al-fiqh) a classic form, and Al-Shaybani wrote early on the law of war and peace. Later jurists include Ibn Hazm of the literalist Zahiri school, Al-Mawardi on government, Al-Shatibi on the purposes (maqasid) of the law, and Shah Waliullah in eighteenth-century India. Sunni and Shi'i schools differ on some sources and methods. On this site it answers questions on disagreement and expertise (2.7.1), divine command ethics, informal reasoning, causation and free will.
Thinkers of this school
- Al-Shatibid. 1388
- Al-Mawardi972 – 1058
- Al-Shafi’i767 – 820
- Al-Shaybani749 – 805
- Ibn Hazm994 – 1064
- Shah Waliullah1703 – 1762
Guide: Schools of Philosophy: The Main -isms and the Questions They Answer
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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 replies -
Every legal code I know contradicts itself somewhere, and courts still function
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 with an ordinary law. If classical logic…
Started by Hamza Qureshi5 replies -
Dharma, li, sharia, natural law: four words English keeps flattening into “duty” or “law”
Last week an engineering student in the evening class on Indian philosophy that I help with 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 tried…
Started by Meera Kulkarni5 replies -
A verdict that was right by accident: did the court know he was guilty?
Many years ago, early in my time as a court correspondent, I watched a magistrate convict a young man of a burglary largely on the identification of one witness. The identification was confident, the defence was weak, and I was as satisfied…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan5 replies -
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, more or less as a hobby, 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 replies -
Thirty-one years of watching courts decide what is ‘reasonable’, and no degrees of truth in sight
Here is something I watched every week in the courts of Punjab. 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 fuzzy logic was invented…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan5 replies -
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 replies -
Keeping the losing opinion on the page: is disagreement inside a tradition as deep as disagreement between traditions?
In my Tuesday Talmud study group 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…
Started by Eliana Halpern5 replies -
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 replies -
‘Illa, kāraṇa, gù: what each tradition’s word for ’cause’ lets it ask
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 second life in law. In Islamic jurisprudence, the…
Started by Layla Sfeir6 replies -
Thirty-one years in the courts: legal causation is not physical causation, and should not be
For thirty-one years I reported on the courts of Lahore for a newspaper, the last ten mostly from the sessions courts. In retirement I am reading the jurisprudence I only skimmed in those years, and causation is where philosophy and the courtroom…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan4 replies -
Qiyās, kal va-chomer and legal analogy: defeasible reasoning with centuries of rules
The reasoning I heard most often from the bench, in all my years in court, 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…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan5 replies