Who is the Lawgiver? The Hermeneutical Grounds of the Methods of Interpreting Qur’an and Sunna ( istinbāṭ al-aḥkām ) (original) (raw)

Since the very beginning of Islamic Law there was a need to solve legal problems in accordance with Qur’an and Sunna. Thus, one of the most important methodological problems was to discover the meanings of the authoritative texts (nuṣūṣ), Qur’an and the prophetic Sunna, for deriving rules from them. We can see in the uṣūl al-fiqh literature that the scope of research concerning the language and its role in the process of interpretation is apparently the most important and the largest one. This also implies a specific epistemological approach and a special method to understand the authoritative texts. In this article, I will focus on the methods of interpretation of the authoritative texts and the concept of bayān, which allows to present a communication model of the uṣūl al-fiqh to understand, how these methods of interpretation are justified, used in the process of deriving rules, and on which epistemological preconditions they are based on. This article covers mainly the time between the fourth/10th and the ninth/15th centuries. By analysing bayān, the main question is whether really Qur’an and Sunna show us, what can be regarded as a valid rule or is it the scholar, who creates rules.