Abdal Hakim Murad - The Cambridge Companion to Islamic Theology

238 Umar F. Abd-Allah
The historical relationship between the sacred law and classical
theology (kalam) must be distinguished from the law’s inherently religious
nature, its immense body of positive law, and the various Sufi paths
of spiritual illumination. Islamic theological speculation exercised only a
limited impact on positive law, but its influence on Islamic legal theory
(us _
ul al-fiqh) was profound. The emergence of kalam and that of us _
ul
al-fiqh were roughly coeval. Both disciplines matured centuries after the
schools of Islamic law had formulated their distinctive corpuses of
positive law. None of the schools of law systematically reformulated its
established body of substantive law on the basis of the dialectics of later
legal theorists, despite the centrality of legal theory in their legal curricula.
Few failed to note the symbiosis which existed between kalam
and legal theory, but, from the beginning, many jurists questioned the
validity of linking the two disciplines. Most of them ultimately welcomed
legal theory and revered it for the monumental scholastic
achievement that it was, but despite legal theory’s indebtedness to
kalam, a significant number of other jurists regarded kalam as irrelevant
to the art of positive law. Still others regarded its influence as harmful.
thenatureofislamiclaw
The Muslim lives in a theocentric universe, ‘‘in surrender’’ (muslim)
to God, seeking through the prophetic Law to discover and implement
God’s will. The law’s primary sources, the qur’anic revelation and the
prophetic model (sunna), are the material referents of God’s will. From a
modern perspective Islamic law is at once legal and meta-legal: a set of
legislative rules within a moral system of ‘‘oughts’’ and ‘‘ought nots’’,
defining outward standards, while addressing the inward state of the
agent’s heart.
David Santillana observes that ‘‘law and religion, law and morality
are the two aspects of this same [divine] will by which it is constituted and
by which the Muslim community governs itself; every question of law is
also a matter of conscience, and jurisprudence is based on theology in the
final analysis’’. 2 Henri de Wael remarks that to be a good Muslim is, first
of all, to keep the rules of Islamic law faithfully. Consequently, the law
does not allow itself to be reduced to a simple methodology for governing
social relations but regards itself as expressing morality at the highest
plane, for the law’s fundamental purpose is to ‘‘enjoin the right and forbid
the wrong’’. 3 Many acts are not subject to secular sanctions but await
their rewards and punishments in the next world. This otherworldly
emphasis of the law imbues it with a predominantly ethical tone. Law and
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