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the theory of limits 187that sometimes causes a deviation from the rules and ignites some(curved) movements by sheer impulse.These examples illustrate that human behaviour needs to berestrained by legal order. This is the reason why Allah sent messengersto humankind who brought legislation in order to put lawlesssocieties back on (the straight) track. Before it was MuÈammad’s (ß)turn to bring a new message, Allah decided to send messengers who,each in his own society, enforced concrete punishments that wereexpressly stipulated for each individual crime. It was a type of direct,explicit legislation that ended with MuÈammad’s (ß) messengerhoodwhich marked the beginning of a new legal concept: lex liminalis, 8 lawby which humans legislate between the legal limits that the Bookprovides. 98The term ‘liminal’ only seems diametrically opposite to the anthropologicalconcept of ‘liminal’ as Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner defined it. While it istrue that for Turner liminality is a transitional state between two phases (during ritesof passage) in which individuals were ‘betwixt and between’, i.e., neither staying anylonger in the society that they previously belonged to nor yet entering into the societythey will be part of in the future, and while this transitional state is characterisedby an inversion of normative patterns of social hierarchy, the state of liminality inMS’s concept is a state of legislative effort by which the normative patterns of societyare constantly sought after and, if necessary, reinforced. And yet, MS’s concept ofliminality also acknowledges a form of legal ambiguity, openness, and indeterminacy( al-tash§buh!) by which a certain degree of deviation (ÈanÊfiyya!) from the straight pathset down by God is actually quintessential and only human. Moreover, as it is forTurner that during the state of liminality as sense of the ideal state of social existenceis formed or anticipated (communitas), so is MS’s human society a permanently liminalexperience that eventually leads to an ever-deeper realization (or apprehension) ofdivine knowledge, i.e., the totality of objective reality, which is as utopian as Turner’snotion of communitas. Because of this latter resemblance the term lex liminalis waschosen as it seems to us most appropriate to describe MS’s law of limits.9The term ‘legal limits’ has been created to highlight MS’s significant departurefrom the traditional, legal understanding of Èadd / Èudåd which he interprets more inthe literal sense of (geometrical) ‘limits’. As a legal terminus technicus, Èudåd refers to thecanonical punishments that are fixed (or limited) by a clear and decisive text in theQur"an and/or the Sunna, with regard to which a judge does not possess any discretion.The \anafÊ school describes the Èudåd punishments as ‘the right of Allah’, whilethe other schools see them as ‘the right of human beings’ as well. Whereas the\anafÊ school restricts the Èudåd to five crimes (illicit sexual intercourse, theft, banditry,consumption of alcohol, false accusation of illicit sexual intercourse), the M§likÊand Sh§fi#Ê schools also include homicide, apostasy, rebellion, and sodomy. Since thepunishments for these crimes are already fixed, it has been the main concern of thefuqah§" to establish what exactly constitutes theft, adultery, robbery, etc. Like MS,they regard the Èudåd punishments as the upper limit, the maximum punishment thatmust not be exceeded, and for which it is possible to negotiate mitigating circumstances(see al-ZuÈaylÊ, al-Fiqh al-isl§mÊ, vol. 5, 5–12; R. Peters, Crime and Punishment