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Introduction |
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One’s confidence in the reliability of a product is often largely dependent on one’s confidence in the process that yielded the product. Substantive legal rulings similarly enjoy only as much confidence as is enjoyed by the process of legal reasoning that produced them. Muslims, a people who submit to the commandments of God, often find comfort and confidence in the fact that many Islamic commandments are the explicit instruction of the All-Knowing and Wise Creator of humanity and His divinely inspired Messenger, Prophet Muhammad ﷺ. |
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However, the collection of legal rulings by which a Muslim lives includes rulings that involve the effort of human actors—i.e., qualified jurists (fuqahāʾ)—in ascertaining God’s law. It is this human element that may open a door to doubt in the reliability and authoritative nature of legal rulings that make up the corpus of Islamic substantive law known as fiqh. This doubt may come in various forms. One of its forms is a view of Islamic law that paints it as the product of the arbitrary whims of jurists who haphazardly issue rulings based primarily on considerations of convenience and expediency. In other words, Islamic law is depicted as standing on thin rational ground and lacking in coherence and consistency. Some have painted the Muslim judge as one who “issued arbitrary, irrational, and expedient decisions without respect for general principles of law,” 1 |
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and viewed justice in Islamic courts as lacking any “fixed rules of a formally rational law.” 2 |
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This view of Islamic law may have managed to taint the perception that some Muslims have of their own legal history and tradition. It is precisely this distorted image that this publication aims to rectify by relying on the sub-field of Islamic legal maxims (al-qawāʿid al-fiqhiyya). Much has already been written about Islamic legal history and Islamic legal theory, all of which demonstrates a commitment to rational and coherent law-making on the part of Muslim jurists. However, while such defenses may require a certain level of technical knowledge in order for them to have their intended effect, legal maxims have an intuitive appeal that can quickly give insight into the |
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coherent and principled nature of |
fiqh. |
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By becoming acquainted with Islamic legal maxims, one can appreciate the level of consistency and legal harmony that the jurists aimed to achieve in their fiqhī enterprise. It becomes apparent that they engaged in legal reasoning that adhered to principles of general application and strove to avoid legal absurdities and logical inconsistencies. Not only do these maxims reveal to us a strong commitment to principles, but they also give us insight into what principles guided Muslim jurists, such as the presumption of innocence and the determinative nature of custom. Knowledge of Islamic legal maxims aids in dismantling the view of Islamic law as a collection of arbitrary laws created by ancient men. The image painted by these maxims is one of sophisticated jurists who recognized the need for consistency in the law. As such, they made note of the foundational principles of law found in the Qur’an and Sunnah and treated them as cardinal rules. They also detected patterns in the law and, from those patterns, deduced principles which they then applied to analogous cases. By giving an overview and a commentary on some of the well-known Islamic legal maxims, I hope to foster a sense of conviction amongst the Muslim audience in the Islamic legal tradition. |
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About The Author
