Abdal Hakim Murad - The Cambridge Companion to Islamic Theology

Theological dimensions of Islamic law 239
morality merge into a general philosophy of life. Every social institution
and human activity is imbued with religious significance. 4
religious and secular law in perspective
Throughout the course of pre-modern history, religion tended to
involve all aspects of life. The relegation of religion to the private sphere
is a decidedly modern phenomenon. In the West, secularism is often
taken for granted as if it were a distinctive legacy, but the division
between church and state is relatively recent. It did not emerge in an
unbroken continuum from ancient Greece and Rome but was the
product of revolutionary politics, beginning with the Glorious Revolution
of the seventeenth century and reaching its apotheosis with the
Russian Revolution over 200 years later. 5 Although Islamic law falls
within the traditional pattern of embracing the private and public
spheres, surprisingly, the separation between religious authority and
the state – contrary both to common opinion and to contemporary
Islamist ideology – was the norm in the Islamic world for more than a
millennium. 6
In its comprehensiveness, Islamic law is akin to the legal outlook of
the Hebrew prophets, Rabbinic Jews and the Persian Mazdeans. In early
Indic religion, the governing concept of dharma stood for the totality of
religion, legality and morality. Dharma mirrored the natural order of the
universe and permeated all human relationships, so that ‘‘the distinction
between religion and law can be justified only from the European point
of view; the two notions are one in the Indian dharma’’. 7 The origins of
Greek and Roman law were religious; it was only later that they became
secular. The priest of ancient Rome has been compared to the Muslim
muftı, and Roman law did not remove itself from the precincts of the
priestly collegiums until the latter part of the fourth century bce. 8
Like Islam, Rabbinic Judaism is distinctly nomocratic. Rabbinic
Jews, like Muslims, govern their communities through a system of
revealed law, and not through theocratic priesthoods as in the Biblical
(pre-Rabbinic) or Mazdean traditions. Orthodox rabbis summon Jews to
take on the ‘‘yoke of the Kingdom’’ in faith and moral conduct, meaning
total submission to God’s law at the individual and social levels. 9
Nevertheless, the legal implications of both the Islamic and Rabbinic
systems, apart from what is unequivocally understood from revelation,
are matters of extension by exegesis and cognate principles. Both religions
combine revelation with reason as the path to legal knowledge,
while rejecting exclusively human legislation.
Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008