Abdal Hakim Murad - The Cambridge Companion to Islamic Theology

Theological dimensions of Islamic law 249
One of the truisms of Islamic studies in the West until recently was
the notion that the voluntaristic ethics of Ash‘arite theology ultimately
destroyed the rationalism of Islamic law as reflected in Mu‘tazilite
theology and the ra’y of early jurists. This misconception was rooted
primarily in a confusion of legal rationality with the rationalism of
speculative theology. It fails to take account of the history of positive
law in Islam, and also neglects the ethical perspective of Maturıdite
theology, the dominant theology of the H _
anafı school.
The theological problem of good and evil in Islam was hardly a new
dilemma. Plato had asked whether God commands because He knows a
thing to be good, or whether a thing is good because He commands it.
Mu‘tazilite theology supported the first proposition; the Ash‘arites held
to the second; the Maturıdites took a nuanced position between the two.
Even the Ash‘arite view, at least among significant representatives of the
school, was not categorical. Shihab al-Dın al-Qarafı (d.1285) contended
that there were broad areas of agreement between all theological schools.
The actual point of disagreement, in his assessment, concerned the
merits and demerits of good and evil and the nature of reward and
punishment in the hereafter. 53
Although an Ash‘arite, Juwaynı held that the good and evil of
human acts could be assessed on rational grounds, even though the acts
of God Himself lay beyond the purview of human reason. Ghazalı preferred
this position, and Razı is reported to have adopted it towards the
end of his life. 54 The Maturıdite position was similar to that of the
Mu‘tazilites but did not accept the same primary corollaries which the
Ash‘arites rejected. Maturıdite theology held that all analogies between
God and the created world were false because of the utter discontinuity
between the physical and the metaphysical planes. Yet such analogies
were necessary for human thought; the Mu‘tazilites, in their view, had
placed exaggerated confidence in speculative reason at the expense of
spiritual intuition (ma‘rifa) and had drawn analogies between God and
creation, especially regarding the issue of good and evil, where no such
analogical correspondence was possible. 55
the need for revealed law
Muslim jurists were more concerned with practice than with
theory. The primary purpose of Islamic law in their view was the
well-being and salvation of the entire community, which required clear
tenets of faith and practice, not abstruse matters that only theologians
and the scholarly minded could understand. Sound adherence to the law
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