Preservation of Religion: A Critical Reflection on Maqasid al-Sh

🔗 Source: <a href=”https://t.me/DrAkramNadwi/5536″ target=”_blank”>https://t.me/DrAkramNadwi/5536

📜 Introduction
The maqasid al-shari`ah are intellectual abstractions of general principles from particular, historical rulings in Islamic jurisprudence.

The mental operation involved in such abstraction consists of taking an element or aspect of several events or phenomena out of their particular contexts, and giving that element or aspect a name, a word. This word, this named entity, is then talked about and applied as if it had a degree of reality more or less equal to the events or phenomena from which it was derived by abstraction.

For example, if you observe white snow, white spit, white cotton, a glazed white tile, or a white flower in sunlight, you may come to believe that, despite the observable variation in the colour of snow, spit, cotton, tile, or flower, the similarity is substantial enough for you to posit that something called whiteness exists. But in reality, whiteness does not exist or not in the same way as the colour embodied in the particular instances mentioned. Whiteness is simply a verbal or nominal reference-point. As such, it is very useful, even indispensable, for our need to point to, to group together or to differentiate, events and phenomena.

🕋 Commands of Allah
Allah has commanded Muslims in the Qur’an to proclaim the oneness and otherness of God and the humanity and servanthood of His Messenger, to do wudu`, to establish prayer, to pay zakah, to fast Ramadan, to do hajj, to fight against those who make war on Muslims for being Muslims, to recite the Qur’an, to distinguish halal and haram, etc. Islamic jurisprudence has recorded, deliberated, and elaborated the rules for how to carry out these commands. One effect of carrying out these commands is to protect and preserve the religion. Doing these things enables Muslims to sustain the habit of remembering their dependence on Allah and remembering that they will return to Him and be judged. Is it legitimate to say that this effect is the purpose of the commands I just listed? I think we should be highly cautious about making such a claim.

🌟 Preservation of the Religion: Allah’s Role
First of all, it is not obvious that Muslims are the principal agents in preserving the religion by their practising it. It is more likely, and nearer to the meaning of islam (surrender), to understand that the religion is preserved by Allah Himself, as a grace from Him, enabling and assisting the Muslims to obey His commands. Saying so is not merely a gesture of piety or good manners, but rather an essential re-affirmation of the otherness of God — of being seen by Him, not seeing Him, of being interrogated and understood by Him, not presuming to interrogate and understand Him. There is great danger in projecting a human understanding of a divine command as an improved expression of that command because it uses a higher level of generality. Let me illustrate with an example:

📦 Example: Purpose of Zakah
A number of well-meaning scholars have affirmed that the purpose of sadaqa and zakah is the alleviation of poverty. It is indeed the case that one of the commanded expenditures from zakah is to help the poor and needy. But it is only one. The well-meaning scholars, having determined that the purpose of zakah is the alleviation or elimination of poverty in society, go on to propose that zakah funds should be deemed a public financial resource and invested in profit-making ventures so that, more wealth being generated, more can be allocated to the needs of the poor. They say this would be a more efficient use of the ummah’s resources.

But it is not true that the purpose of zakah is to help the poor, even if that is one of its effects. If that were its purpose, the command of zakah/sadaqa could only apply to the rich. That is self-evidently false. What the well-meaning scholars have done is to reduce the religious command to an instrument of economics, the so-called science of allocating scarce resources. As a religious command, sadaqa/zakah helps believers to free themselves from being possessed by their possessions, and more generally (the command to pay zakah is frequently linked to salah) to free themselves from their own preoccupations, in favour of pleasing Allah. That is why even the poorest among us can do sadaqa by approaching others with a smile or by clearing obstacles from a public highway; we can cleanse or purify our personal powers by regularly dedicating a portion of those powers (of which wealth is just one) to what is pleasing to Allah.

The broader assumption of an Islamic economics approach to zakah funds, though for the good purpose of helping the poor, in fact shares the belief that resources are scarce — in reality, it is distribution that is scarce. So, instead of being characterised by compassion, society-as-a-whole comes to be characterised by pity, the pity of the rich for the poor. Now pity may be a prompt, an opening of the door to compassion, but it is not yet compassion.

💡 Caution Against Philosophical Efficiency
My fear is that, in the interests of a sort of philosophical or conceptual efficiency, people have derived from diverse rulings of the shariah* a group of principles they present as the *maqasid* (the purposes) of the *shariah. In so doing they have elevated the authority of a human understanding of divine commands to the same, or nearly the same, level as the divine commands themselves. I am formally a Hanafi, and accordingly uphold the usefulness, indeed the necessity, of qiyas (analogical reasoning) in the development and extension of Islamic law. In situation A, the Messenger ruled such and such; situation B seems to be similar in many respects to situation A, so by analogy we can commend as religiously valid the same ruling as for situation A, or some ruling very similar to it.

Now, since it is human understanding that determines the similarity in the two situations, the ruling for situation B does not and cannot have the same authority as the Prophetic ruling from which we derived it. Therefore it is subject to challenge, to alteration, to cancellation even, if the human reasoning that established the analogy is found to be faulty, or if, for situation B, closer or more appropriate material is to be found in one or more other situations, for which we also have Prophetic rulings.

📜 Maqasid and Qiyas
Superficially, it seems that the thinking behind maqasid al-shari`ah is merely an extension of qiyas (analogical reasoning). However, that is precisely the issue. Traditional qiyas is localised and not generalised; it applies to particular situations and is implemented with humility and reliance on Allah. By contrast, the derivation on which the maqasid are based is not tied to one or a small number of situations. Instead, it is based on human understanding of “Islam as a whole” or “Islamic Law as a whole.”

💡 Problems with Generalising the Maqasid
Historically particular rulings have been grouped under the maqasid as if they were designed to serve these general purposes, which is untrue. Islamic Law didn’t develop in that way. The generality of the maqasid makes it difficult to achieve consensus on their meaning. Despite their institutional prestige, this generality poses serious risks.

🌍 Historical Example: The Greatest Happiness Principle
Consider a similar project in the Western world during the 19th century: the legitimacy of government was measured by the principle of producing “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.” While it sounds good, in practice, it was useless because people couldn’t agree on what constitutes “happiness.” Ultimately, the principle’s practical use was limited to its negative aspect: choosing the policy that harms the fewest people. Perhaps a similar fate awaits the principles of maqasid al-shari`ah.

⚖️ Challenges in Applying the Maqasid
Some will claim that Muslims must first become economically strong to protect their religion, even if that requires tolerance of some haram. Others will argue that this pragmatism ruins the religion. This kind of dispute about the meaning and intentions behind the maqasid will arise for each of them.

💭 Danger of Generalities
General principles are intellectually attractive, as they give us a sense of understanding what lies beneath the surface of reality. However, general principles applied as absolutes can be harmful. We should be cautious of divorcing such principles from the historical rulings that shaped Islamic Law.

📜 Islamic Law’s Development
The bulk of Islamic Law didn’t emerge from general principles like *maqasid al-shariah*. However, maxims were derived from historical rulings by jurists. One such maxim in the Hanafi tradition is that “the status of woman is covering.” If rulings are derived from this maxim, it can lead to severe restrictions on women’s participation in public life, despite the fact that the Prophet (salla-llahu alayhi wa-sallam) allowed and encouraged women to be present in public spaces.

🚨 Conclusion: Beware of Absolutes
We must be wary of the maqasid al-shari`ah becoming absolutes in our thinking and shaping legal responses to particular, historical realities. The risk of injustice is too high when generalities are applied in place of thoughtful, context-driven rulings.