Natural Law in Islam

Abstract

This chapter will introduce the basic, theoretical architecture of competing Islamic natural law theories from the pre-modern period (ninth to fourteenth centuries). Specifically, it will outline juristic debates in the usul al-fiqh genre on reason as a source of law, where revelation is silent. Thereafter it will reflect on a range of doctrinal debates inwhichmany of those same pre-modern jurists came to a legal determination without reference to scriptural (or any other) texts. Drawing on a curious heuristic they labelled huquq Allah and huquq al-ʿibad (the claims of God and the claims of individuals), I will show that despite not invoking (expressly or otherwise) any natural law account of Islamic law, jurists nonetheless developed law based on a mode of rationality that could be called anything from ‘rational’ to ‘common-sense’ to ‘pragmatic’. Whether or not the huquq Allah/huquq al-ʿibad heuristic is proof positive of natural law in Islam is less important than recognising the scope of questions that have yet to be examined. But as I will suggest in the third and concluding part, there are political reasons (some of which enjoy disciplinary cover) that help explain why some questions are not asked, and why some answers are deemed naïve, if not impolitic.