The goal of the preceding discussion was to work out the most basic and significant ethical principles of the Qurʾān using an innovative, modern reading of aš-Šāṭibī’s work al-Muwāfaqāt. The task of hermeneutically deciphering theological-moral concepts from aš-Šāṭibī’s legal thought, which this work undertook, lays primarily in the elaboration of an ethical system of a genuinely qurʾānic origin.
The hermeneutic elaboration of the Islamic-theological heritage outlined in this study makes both an epistemological and a socio-ethical claim. On the one hand, the illustration of the theological tradition’s profound meaning in Islam and the accompanying textual analysis of ethical concepts, reveal the potential of this tradition to actively and creatively participate in contemporary methodological controversies regarding the analysis of traditional texts of revelation. On the other hand, in its openness to philosophical rational reflection of morality and ethics, the Islamic-theological legacy exhibits the essential characteristics of a universal social ethic, whose reflection and reconstruction can make a fundamental contribution to answering controversial questions of inter-religious and pluralistic forms of society. Moreover, as Hansjörg Schmid has rightly pointed out, Islamic theology’s capacity for dialogue clearly manifests itself in the fact that Islam, “unlike the Christian churches, knows no instances of official nomination”1 and uses a broad concept of plurality per se.
Today, due to orthodox movements’ appeal to a ritualistic Islam, whose task is defined more by their justifying the use of force or in mobilizing measures than in their development of theology, the capacity for dialogue and the acceptance of otherness, which served as a basis for the diversity of methods in the Islamic theological tradition, have faded into the background. However, this is merely the result of the failure to establish an academic theological discourse capable of opening itself to new challenges of scientific thought.
The comprehensive presentation of fundamental ethical concepts in this work should have made clear that the qurʾānic message not only provides explicit instructions on the relationship between the sacred and the profane, but also descends into the depths of the individual as a subject to “root belief in the one and only God in order to establish a spiritual life based on this belief which expresses the fact that humans are neither mere biological beings nor simple cogs unleashed in the wheels of fratricidal struggles. Islam is, above all, silm, that is, the peace of the heart, of inner exhilaration and between peoples.”2 Herein lie the Qurʾān’s highest intentions, as aš-Šāṭibī explained rationally, theologically and contextually, through his five ethical maxims.
It is, thus, not surprising that Muslim scholars always grasp fiqh as a human endeavour to understand the Word of God both according to reason and with orientation to faith, in which more space and weight are granted to the adaptation and transformation of lived human reality than prescribed ritual practices. With regard to fundamental theological ethical questions and their relevance for modern debate on the Qurʾān, the following remarks are intended to present some core thoughts related to individual topics discussed thus far.
In this study, the perception of a reciprocal relationship between secular and divine ethics became apparent at various levels of confrontation with the Islamic legal tradition. At the same time, the concept of responsibility was expanded into religious, social, and moral aspects. Islamic ethics’ attempt to rationally justify God’s commands seems promising. In terms of religious duties’ rational justifiability, the Islamic legal tradition consciously emphasizes the interrelation of reason and faith, thus rejecting the gap between the religious and the profane. Self-respect and respect for family and societal bonds, etc., are to be respected just as much as the article of the confession of faith.
According to aš-Šāṭibī, the determination of ethical maxims stands before an intertextual view of the sources of Islamic jurisprudence, namely the Word of God (Qurʾān), the words, acts and implied concessions of the Prophet Muḥammad (saws), i.e., the Sunna, as well as the consensus of the scholars (iǧmāʿ) and analogy (qiyās). Here, aš-Šāṭibī points to the danger of treating the sources of jurisprudence as four separate, independent sources, since they are all used to come as close as possible to the divine judgment. In addition, the Qurʾān emphasizes that there is only one legislative authority (Q 6:63). This legislation, however, remains theological in character and is to be located in the ethical-moral field. By distinguishing between divine and human causalities, secular legislation is granted a special autonomous scope in Islamic moral and legal thought. Secular jurisprudence’s particular position and the autonomy of its essence make itself recognizable in the assumption that the termination of a secular causal chain of action, which forms the basis of a moral or judicial determination, is more a matter of human decision and consideration than it is an occasion for revelation to provide an answer.
The hypothesis of a rational justification of religious duties, however, which underpinned the central idea of separation of religious and secular law, was not accepted by all Islamic currents of thought. Here, it becomes clear that theology struggled with a purely rational concept of ethics and law.
This conviction is based on a discourse-ethical thesis, which states that an a priori concept of rationality, such as that of philosophical ethics or the Muʿtazilites, does not permit a theologically acceptable justification of morality. In contrast, ethical theories which make use of a discourse-oriented understanding of rationality promise to solve the paradox by setting up hypotheses which are more theological-ethical in their argumentation, and find their justification in the correlation between the author and the recipient of revelation, as well as between the meaning and the interpretation of text. In accordance with its message of universal significance, the Qurʾān calls for a religious motivation that only achieves validity when it has a social impact. In this view, faith and law are equated with one another.
While the confession of faith emphasizes that the Qurʾān holds reason in high esteem and often addresses reason, it concludes that, in the absence of a revealed nomos, the human is unable to distinguish between the highest good and the radically bad or even pass eternally valid ethical laws, since both the complexity of human action and the anticipation of essential goals of action prove to be unfathomable to the intellect. According to this understanding, the revelation is marked by a particular humanistic tendency, namely, that which “does not fall into a blind Promethean pursuit” and regards belief in God, the “supreme guarantor of equilibrium and order in the universe,”3 as something that thinks ahead of reason.
If reason is attributed the possibility of fallibility, it must be stated that one cannot avoid reference to a higher authority that determines affairs and makes them known to humans, whereby it is human reason itself which prescribes devotion to a higher power, i.e., God, as it understands that no one can be more adept at law and more able to know the needs of His creatures than the one who issued the law and created them. The dual commitment to faith and law arising from the theory of reconciliation of revelation and reason amounts to the preservation of the common good as the ultimate goal.
However, since qurʾānic ethics is the result of a complex process of deduction, in which human knowledge and divine illumination prove to be indispensable prerequisites, a reflection on the nature of the human will as an antipole to believing knowledge is unavoidable. A hermeneutically grounded subdivision of virtues and goodness in their relationship with the concept of responsibility can help define individual and communal relief. As part of creation, the human is connected to all created beings in solidarity with them. According to Q 22:65, everything created in the world has been entrusted to human beings “under the necessary condition of being understandable as the common good of all humanity.”4 The human obligation of care-taking takes on a concrete form in its function of keeping ethical maxims in balance: protection of faith, protection of the self, protection of the intellect, protection of the family and the protection of property. At the heart of this balance is the relationship between the protection of faith and the protection of the self, which serves as the basis for constructing an ethical and accountable selfhood.
From the ethical point of view, the commandments and prohibitions in the Qurʾān are to be regarded as deontological moments of moral judgment concerning their relation to the ethical maxims’ teleological character. With regard to the Islamic doctrine of duty, this finding leads to the conclusion that, in the Qurʾān, it is not entities or individual things such as sexuality, music, alcohol, or certain foods that are forbidden or commanded, but rather the relationships, which people maintain to these entities amidst a network of social interaction, that can lead to a benefit being commanded or a harm forbidden.
From a societal point of view, in the normative process of interpreting revelation, it is necessary to reflect on the location of theological ethics between moral-social compulsion, on the one hand, and the power of the legislative human or divine authority, on the other. Amidst the tense relationship between the morality of the masses resulting from collective coercion and the authorities’ desire for their ideal of the good, this also raises the question of the level on which contemporary Islamic theological ethics should approach the matter.
In this study, a spiritual aspect of qurʾānic normativity was also pointed out which allows the individual, independent of the mere conformity to social rules, to strive for the preservation of the selfhood in a dialogical relationship to society, open to critique, through spiritual edification and the development of narrative identity. Yet, to preserve individuals while limiting them to avoid the aforementioned, the Qurʾān frequently admonishes two enemies of morality: the pursuit of impulsive desires and blind imitation (Q 2:170). Consequently, rationality must be attributed to the individual element so that the reflective, active soul can be capable of being moral. The concept of nafs, thus, remains the linchpin of qurʾānic ethics, something which renders any confrontation with Islamic norms complex.
Regarding the attribution of disciplines that deal with the Islamic normative theory to a certain area of science which accords with its main subject of study, one can say that, in the case of qurʾānic ethics, there is not a singular name for this field of knowledge that inimitably unites the individual, social, human and the divine.
Nevertheless, should one desire to give this normative system a name that could do justice to its theological discursive character, then it seems that piety (taqwā) is the critical concept here, which, as the pure content of faith, expresses a high regard for the divine law, which both unites and weakens the two extreme feelings of love and fear, such that it can both motivate an individual to perform a given moral act or restrain from it. The true nature of taqwā reveals the ethical nature of the Word of God, which repeatedly points to virtue and the common good as paths to happiness (Q 68:4).
This creates a closing prospect for this work. The Qurʾān’s theological-ethical message is only accessible through a belief-oriented conception of the sacred, which decisively shapes the intellectual contents of the linguistic sign in the discourse of revelation. Here, the imaginary must be considered as part of the divine symbolic language. The modern history of biblical hermeneutics has, despite the dominance of the post-modern’s positivist scientific spirit, proven that a scholarly reflection on revelation does not necessarily amount to a desacralization or demythologization of the Word of God. According to Arkoun, the application of more recent hermeneutic methods of interpretation to the revelatory text is accompanied by the danger of estranging it from its ethical-spiritual message.5
Today’s call for a theologically justified, scholarly reading of the Qurʾān faces the challenge of, if not overcoming, then at least minimizing the spiritual distance between our present secular understanding of language and the language of the Qurʾān as well as between the Qurʾān as recitation and the Qurʾān as a written book.6
Reading the Qurʾān consciously means adopting its imaginary dimensions as they manifest themselves, above all, in its poetry and the suggestive effect it emanates. Understanding the Word of God means confronting the aesthetic structure of the Qurʾān in the sense of Islam’s proof of faith in order to derive from its foundation the ethical principles for the believing selfhood.7
As early as classical mysticism, the spiritual power of the Qurʾān and the recitation of its powerful poetry sparked a sense of God’s presence in Muslims, in a manner similar to the biblical psalms, not only in terms of spiritual edification, but also in the sense of a spiritual cleansing. According to this view, the beautiful, the good and the true are brought together in the “poetry” of the Qurʾān.
Since the beginning of the qurʾānic exegesis in the late 2nd/8th century, the question of the extent to which the distinction between the Meccan and Medinan suras serves as a basis for reading and understanding Qurʾān’s ethical instructions has been posed repeatedly. The metrical, rhetorical, and semantic peculiarities of the Meccan suras have always been a central point in the argumentation of those who attribute Meccan revelations a certain theological and normative universality. Contemporary qurʾānic hermeneutics sees a solution to the stalemate between modern misconceptions and erroneous readings of the Qurʾān in the re-evaluation of the old division between the Meccan and the Medinan suras and justifies this procedure with the equally spiritual and liturgical character of the Meccan Qurʾān. For its part, Islamic theological ethics underscores the spiritual claim of the Meccan revelation with reference to qurʾānic verses of the Meccan period such as Q 5:105 74:38, or 74:38, which clearly display features of convictional ethics.
The main feature of the Meccan revelation lies in its development of the semantics of faith which emerges from the new metaphorical usage of words and statements in the discourse of faith. The initial transformation of the empirical self takes place in a transcendental usage of language. The new world of belief uses an alienating symbolism in which the expectation horizons are set anew. The process of divergent and theologically coloured use of words and rhetorical images reached its zenith in the middle of the Meccan phase of revelation. Initially, for example, reference is made to the estrangement of familiar commercial thought. The common good introduced in the Meccan suras can only be understood in the ontological sphere of belief, in which the self per se is perceived as a transitive entity. This means that the caretaking presupposed by the Qurʾān does not come to the self from the outside, but is to be understood as an integral part of the self.
The close relationship between caring and selfhood can be deduced from the creation-theological concept of common, unified human origin, regarded in the Qurʾān as the principle of faith. “Mankind, fear your Lord, who created you of a single soul, and from it created its mate, and from the pair of them scattered abroad many men and women; and fear God by whom you demand one of another, and the wombs; surely God ever watches over you.” (Q. 4:1). Unlike in classical philosophical ethics, in which discussion is focused exclusively on the good for “us,” the Qurʾān’s doctrine of faith presupposes an inexhaustible and universally valid use of the predicate “good.”
In the Meccan revelations, the “true” well-being and the highest good (maṣlaḥamuʿtabara) is only attainable through the renunciation of individual goods oriented towards private utility. The social common good, in contrast, is an expression and manifestation of the highest good. The qurʾānic doctrine of goods includes the so-called “moral” and “pre-moral” goods at an equal degree. Pre-moral goods, which exist independently of personal thought and desire, are considered universal and predominantly attributed to the Meccan suras. So-called “moral” goods are those which are entrusted to the responsible human action for their observation in the context of life. The latter are based on qurʾānic verses of the Medinan phase and the rich Hadith literature on issues of civil law such as marriage, divorce, behavior during the state of war, dealing with apostasy, and others.
The Medinan concept of the good which has prevailed in the course of Islamic history is of a more legal nature and is equated with conformity to the law. The true essence of the common good in the Qurʾān, however, comes mostly from the unrestricted humanist claim that welfare should be seen as a form of fulfilment of the self. The pursuit of happiness is, according to qurʾānic semantics of the faith, only fulfilled by the recognition of the obligation of care towards the other, the faceless everyman.
Hansjörg Schmid, Islam im europäischen Haus (Herder, 2012), 534.
Mohamed Aziz Lahbabi, Der Mensch: Zeuge Gottes, 194f.
Mohamed Aziz Lahbabi, Der Mensch: Zeuge Gottes, 194.
Ibid., 196.
Mohammed Arkoun, Ouvertures sur l’Islam (Paris, 1989), 65.
Arkoun describes the difficulties associated with such an interpretation in the following terms: “Notre culture ne peut plus se mouvoir dans cet univers qu’elle qualifie de magique, superstitieux, irréal, irrational, imaginaire, fabuleux, légendaire: tout un vocabulaire qui traduit la différence, le rejet, l ́éloignement, la disqualification plutôt que l’intégration dans une intelligibilité compréhensive, c’est-à-dire qui accueille la totalité des faits et phénomènes offerts à l’analyse.” One of Arkoun’s main concerns is to “dévoiler des significations dans réduire le mystère, le caractère ineffable de ce qui est dévoilé, montrer sans démontrer ni mettre hors circuit les moyens de la connaissance” (ibid., 78).
N. Kermani, Gott ist schön (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1999), 85.