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Islamic Natural Law Theories »

Book cover image of Islamic Natural Law Theories by Anver M. Emon

Authors: Anver M. Emon
ISBN-13: 9780199579006, ISBN-10: 0199579008
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Date Published: June 2010
Edition: (Non-applicable)

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Author Biography: Anver M. Emon

Anver M. Emon is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto, where he specializes in Islamic law and history. Professor Emon's research focus is on premodern and modern Islamic law and legal theory, premodern modes of governance and adjudication, and the role of Shari'a both inside and outside the Muslim world. He is the founding editor of Middle East Law and Governance: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and lectures widely about the intersection between rule of law, governance, and Shari'a.

Book Synopsis

Islamic Natural Law Theories offers the first sustained jurisprudential inquiry into Islamic natural law theory. It introduces readers to the central figures in the Islamic natural law tradition and their canonical works, analyzes the historical development of Islamic jurisprudence and explains the major contrasts with Western traditions of natural law.
In popular debates about Islamic law, modern Muslims perpetuate an image of Islamic law as legislated by God, to whom the devout are bound to obey. Reason alone cannot obligate obedience; at most it can confirm or corroborate what is established by source texts endowed with divine authority.

This book shows, however, that premodern Sunni Muslim jurists were not so resolute. Instead, they asked whether and how reason alone can be the basis for asserting the good and the bad, and thereby justifying obligations and prohibitions under Shari'a. They theorized about the authority of reason amidst competing theologies of God and their implications on moral agency. For them, nature became the link between the divine will and human reason. Nature is the product of God's willful creation for the benefit of humanity. Since nature is created by God and thereby reflects His goodness, nature is fused with both fact and value. Consequently, as a divinely created good, nature can be investigated to reach both empirical and normative conclusions about the good and bad. They disagreed, however, whether nature's goodness is a result of God's justice or grace upon humanity, thus contributing to different theories of natural law.

By recasting the Islamic tradition of jurisprudence, the book sheds substantial light on an uncharted tradition of natural law theory, and on the proper understanding of Islamic faith.

Table of Contents

I Introduction 1

II Hard natural law 40

III The voluntarist critique of hard natural law 90

IV Soft natural law 123

V Conclusion 189

Bibliography 207

Index of names 219

Index of concepts 221

Subjects