Islamic ethics : fundamental aspects of human conduct Islamic ethics : fundamental aspects of human conduct

There have been two main traditions of writing on ethics in the Islamic tradition, one philosophical and related to the works of Aristotle and other Greek philosophers, represented by thinkers such as Avicenna, and one theological, represented by such figures as the famous theologian al-Qadi Abd al-Jabbar. Some later scholars attempted to combine those two traditions. For the most part, however, the views of the jurists have been ignored. Abdulaziz Sachedina here calls attention to this third tradition of ethics, which has its home in legal literature. The problem is that Islamic jurists did not produce a genre of ethical manuals, and their form of ethics, which Sachedina terms juridical ethics, must be derived or extracted from works that ostensibly treat legal rulings and obligations, or scriptural hermeneutics and legal theory. Presenting an outline of the version of Islamic ethics that is embedded in the textual legacy of the Islamic legal tradition, he argues that this juridical ethics is an important, even dominant form of ethics in modern Islam. He notes that this form of ethics has been challenged by modernity and examines the variety of ways in which legal ethical thinkers have reacted. How do Muslim religious leaders come to grips with modern demands of directing their communities to live as modern citizens of nation-states? What kind of moral and spiritual resources are being garnered by their scholars to respond to the new issues in sciences, more immediately in medicine, and constantly changing social relationships? To answer these pressing questions, it is necessary to go beyond the philosophical ethics of virtue and human character and acknowledge the importance of ethics to the formulation in Muslim interpretive jurisprudence of religious and moral decisions that are based on reason and revelation. Islamic Ethics introduces the centrality of ethics as the most critical subject in directing the religious-social practice of the Muslim community. It introduces the field of ethics by reinvestigating the Islamic juridical heritage in the classical sources and their application in the contemporary Muslim societies. Until now, Islamic ethics has been studied as part of the philosophical discourse that has been greatly influenced by the Greek ethical tradition traced back to Aristotle. This study marks the departure from that Orientalist approach to uncover the path followed by Muslim legal scholars in the development of the juridical methodology to derive the Shari'a. The juridical methodology is deeply rooted in Islamic textual sources-the Qur'an and the Sunna (Tradition)-and the scholarly appraisal of these sources. Islamic texts are imbued with moral principles that have guided the religious-moral practice (the orthopraxy) in all its private and public facets to provide reliable practice for the organization of the community and its institutions. The important finding of the present study underscores the close working relationship between religious and secular in Islamic ethics, simply because of the integrated nature of God's rights and human rights in juridical theology. The study demonstrates the need to go beyond philosophical ethics to underscore the importance of ethics to the formulation of religious-moral procedures based on reason and revelation in Muslim interpretive jurisprudence Cover 1 Half-Title 2 Title 4 Copyright 5 Dedication 6 Contents 8 Acknowledgments 10 1. Introduction 12 2. In Search of a Comprehensive Definition of Ethics 28 3. The Genesis of Moral Reasoning in Religious Ethics 61 4. Scriptural Sources of Ethical Methodology 100 5. Natural Law and Ethical Necessity 131 6. The Ethics of Interpretive Jurisprudence 164 Epilogue 191 Notes 196 Select Bibliography 214 Index 220 Presenting an outline of the version of Islamic ethics that is embedded in the textual legacy of the Islamic legal tradition, Abdulaziz Sachedina argues that this juridical ethics is an important, even dominant form of ethics in modern Islam. He notes that this form of ethics has been challenged by modernity and examines the variety of ways in which legal ethical thinkers have reacted to these challenges