Islamic Ethics: Fundamental Aspects of Human Conduct

225 Pages·2022·10.311 MB·English

by  Abdulaziz Sachedina

Islamic Ethics

Islamic Ethics
Fundamental Aspects of Human Conduct
ABDULAZIZ SACHEDINA
1
3
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2021941267
ISBN 978– 0– 19– 758181– 0
DOI: 10.1093/ oso/ 9780197581810.001.0001
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by LSC communications, United States of America
To
my teachers
and
my students
over the
past sixty years
This book was commissioned as part of the Contending Modernities
Initiative at the University of Notre Dame, and supported by a grant
to Contending Modernities and its Science and the Human Person
working group by the Henry Luce Foundation.
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
1. Introduction 1
2. In Search of a Comprehensive Definition of Ethics 17
3. The Genesis of Moral Reasoning in Religious Ethics 50
4. Scriptural Sources of Ethical Methodology 89
5. Natural Law and Ethical Necessity 120
6. The Ethics of Interpretive Jurisprudence 153
Epilogue 180
Notes 185
Select Bibliography 203
Index 209

Acknowledgments
This inquiry in Islamic ethics is the result of years of study in Islamic philosoph-
ical theology (kalām), jurisprudence (fiqh), and applied ethics (akhlāq). My
published studies have so far treated disparate indicators of ethical consideration
and application in Islamic religious thought and practice.1 My earliest education
in the academic study of Islam, which mainly constituted the evolution of his-
toriography and religious- social institutions that indicated religious and legal
practice in the early community, inspired me to discover the ethical discourse
in Islam about which there was hardly any reference in the Orientalist scholar-
ship focused on philological and literary examination of religious lore preserved
in the Qur’an and the tradition. While Western scholarship concentrated on
discussing the legal aspects of Islamic sources to guide everyday human activity,
there was hardly any reference to the Qur’anic stance on morality or ethics as an
important resource to guide human conduct in the highly religious and spiritual
milieu of Islamic revelation. Islamic tradition was frequently described as legal-
istic in its approach to determine the licit from illicit aspects of human acts. My
own readings of religious sources suggested a far more intricate relationship be-
tween legal and ethical components of Islamic orthopraxy. In view of that, all my
published studies have discussed Islamic ethics in different contexts. I have iden-
tified this academic project as “ethicization”2 of strictly theological and juridical
discourses in Islam. The arguments developed in the present work refer to all my
earlier publications that led me to call attention to the moral nature of religious
thought in Islam. Additionally, the present study embarks on synthesizing my
studies in theology and jurisprudence, which, in turn, will bring juridical the-
ology and Islamic ethics into conversation.
My academic interest in ethics has been in working for many years. I was de-
termined to present well- researched and well- thought- out theses about locating
the possibility of Islamic ethics in Islamic interpretive jurisprudence—t he
“ethicization” enterprise. A major inspiration for this project of relating ethical
reasoning to jurisprudence was provided by Richard M. Frank’s indicative obser-
vation about moral obligation in Sunni theology. In that book he underscores the
importance of expounding ethics in interpretive jurisprudence that undertakes
to elaborate Islamic scriptural sources as they connect to fundamental aspects
of comprehensive human conduct.3 At different times during this intellec-
tual journey I have engaged my colleagues in the West and in many parts of the
Muslim world, more particularly in Najaf, Iraq, and Mashhad, Iran. My engage-
ment with the latter group of scholars was to explore and expound a number