Opwis Felicitas. Ethics and Analogy (Qiyās) in 5th/11th-Century Islamic Legal Theory. Brill,2025. � ix, 201 p.. 2025

Laws regulate behavior among people in society and, in a religious law, between a person and the divine. As a set of rules, laws indicate how one ought to behave and, thus, are intimately connected to ethical criteria that guide one's conduct and assess it as good or bad, right or wrong. Yet, how is good conduct deter�mined? Aristotle points out that �legislators make the citizens good by forming habits in them, and this is the wish of every legislator.�[1] Virtuous conduct, for him, is behaving in accordance with the laws the legislator laid down for the polis, the city state. For Muslims, God is the Legislator, who revealed His Law[2] to humankind through the Prophet Muhammad. The Qur�an and the Sunna, as the practice of the Prophet, inform about dos and don�ts. Divine rulings are simultaneously ethical and legal guidelines, and inform about a person's fate in the Afterlife in relation to acting upon these guidelines. The divine origin and otherworldly dimension of one's earthly conduct also means that ques�tions of theology influence Muslim scholars as those tasked with articulating how Revelation translates into ethico-legal guidelines. Their theological posi�tions inform, for example, their approach to the divine speech, its meaning, and its impact on the mundane conduct and otherworldly consequences for the believer. Ethics, law, and theology are closely entangled.

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

CHAPTER 1 Theological Commitments

Working in the field of legal theory, one quickly recognizes the influence of theology on the way jurists approach and interpret the divine Law.

Muhazili and Ashtari Approaches to Epistemology, Ethics, and Speech

Al-Maturidfs Theological Commitments[110]

CHAPTER 2 Abd al-Jabbar and the Goodness of the Law

The ShafitIjurist and leading Muttazill thinker of his time, al-Qadl tAbd al-Jabbar al-AsadabadI (d. 415/1025)[126] discusses ethical and legal normativity in a number of places throughout his multi-volume al-Mughnl fiabwab al-tawhldwa-l-'adl, particular in the volumes entitled Kltab al-Tacdll wa-l-tajwlr and al-Sharciyyat.

The Ethical Assessment of Acts