Crossing the bridge of Babel from West to East in the attempt to translate the non-identity of law-religion, we have postulated the dialectical coexistence of presence and absence, with the latter taking primacy over the former (Bhaskar, 1993, p. 5).
This coexistence constitutes the background for the comparison between Western and Islamic contract law to which this chapter is dedicated. Here, it is not by (re-)affirming the Western juristic discourse (which reduces fiqh to an improper corpus) but by absenting its presence in Muslim jurisprudence that the totality (third level, 3L, in Bhaskar’s dialectic) of the Islamic contract can be disclosed: a totality where absence and presence necessarily interact.
At this point, we can finally enter our Babel, the city of the ‘aqd.
The Almeh, after our preliminary meeting in the Introduction, has patiently waited for our visit to start. Much of the previous chapter has been devoted to explaining the meaning of listening to the revelation of Islam as echoed in Muslim jurisprudence - whose outcome consists in ‘a conceptual replica of social life, [... that is] balanced between revelation, tradition and reality’ (Calder, 1996, p. 981). It is now time to explore the second dimension of this echo: the ‘aqd as a vehicle of the Islamic legal tradition, where the nomos of the revelation is amplified by the unity-of-diversities that belongs to fiqh plural iurisdictio (section 2.4.3).
3.1.