Islamic jurisprudence
is the subject of the book, by C.G. Weeramantry, entitled, Islamic
Jurisprudence: An International Perspective.
I will begin with an exemplary passage, though there are equally as many
good ones, as I read through the book, here and there, noting down important
points, and quoting the fine scholar. The author is a judge, a Doctor of Laws
of the U of London, a former Justice of the Supreme Court of Sri Lanka, a
former Prof. of Law in Melbourne, and former Judge and Vice-President of the
International Court of Justice at The Hague, as is well defined in the inside
front cover of the book.
With no further delay I give you some of the detailed or indispensable
information which I found in this fascinating and timely read.
On page, 19, he writes, “Human reason was dwarfed by divine revelation.” about
the previous experiences of the non-Arabs. Then he continues further in the
same passage, “It was the Islamic philosophers who broke through this barrier
and unleashed human reason (see pp.103-5). [See H.G.Wells (1925, the pages
mentioned previously)]They thus set off a train of events whose impact on all
subsequent thought was immeasurable.”
As an example of progress in the European’s later search for knowledge, he
writes, “It was from the example of Toledo that Europe first learnt to
understand that learning knows no frontiers, that it is universal, global and
‘human’, that it concerns mankind as a whole, without respect of race or
religion.”
When he writes on the mission of Grotius, in order “for the commencement of
the discipline of international law”; to read human history and to “extract
from it a set of practical rules which mankind must necessarily follow…could
not have failed to consider Islamic history. Indeed one of his observations was
that the Christian nations behaved in war in a manner which compared very
unfavorably with that of pagan nations”.
The author notes that several of the points he makes are not alone enough,
but together paint a clearer picture, about which he at one point writes, “the
thought and learning of a major world culture which had produced a developed
jurisprudence of its own is scarcely likely to have been ignored.” Or …”would
have failed to notice the only systematic writing ever produced thus far upon
the topic”, p. 151 and p. 152, respectively.
Earlier he writes about how Islamic jurisprudence, or fiqh, had developed.
On page, 9, “Since God’s existence was beyond dispute, His power beyond
limitation, His oneness beyond analysis, Islam’s central discipline was not
theology or metaphysics. It was the law (the Shari ‘a). The word of God, itself
beyond dispute, provided a firm foundation of unquestionable scripture that
closed off many metaphysical arguments available in a less firmly based system.
The main question was the meaning of threat which was the unquestioned word of
God – not whether God had said this or willed that or intended the other. Those
latter questions were largely closed.”
“Hence in the words of Professor
Hamilton Gibb, the distinguished Arabic scholar who was Professor of Oriental
Studies at Oxford and Harvard:
“The master science of the Muslim
world was Law. Law, indeed, might be said to embrace all things, human and
divine, and both for its comprehensiveness and for the ardour with which its
study was pursued it would be hard to find a parallel elsewhere, except in
Judaism. (Gibb, 1953, pp. 4-22)”
Speaking about the great gift of political freedom, we read a hardly
unheard fresh analysis of Islam’s push into political activity, with freshness
and vitality here expressed in the original, sympathetic language of H. G.
Wells, on pp 10 – 11, “Islam prevailed because it was the best social and
political order the times could offer. It prevailed because everywhere it found
politically apathetic peoples robbed, oppressed, bullied, uneducated, and
unorganized, and it found selfish and unsound governments out of touch with any
people at all. It was the broadest, freshest, and cleanest political idea that
had yet come into activity in the world. (Wells, 1925, pp. 613 - 14)”
In short, law and theology go hand in hand in the Islamic system. “the term
fiqh, or ‘understanding’, applied to this joint body of learning –
understanding of the word of God and of man’s duties under it. The discipline
of law rather than theology played the primary part in the development of this
understanding, for law became the central discipline of Islam.”
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