The Inner Morality of Sharīʿa: Arguments from Reasonableness in Early Islamic Jurisprudential Debates on God’s Commands (original) (raw)

In this paper I address the following questions: where do principles of Islamic jurisprudence come from? What are their most basic premises, and how are they justified? In other words, what are the uṣūl of the uṣūl? My contention is that this kind of analysis reveals an image of uṣūl al-fiqh as an attempt to develop methods of reasoning that balance the need to remain faithful to revelation on the one hand with the necessity to make the legal system practical, comprehensible and effective, on the other hand. In other words, it is a discipline that managed the tension between authority and reasonableness in Islamic law.