The above study started with the assumption that God's laws are good and, thus, extending them in analogy to situations not directly addressed in Scripture also extends their ethical content.

This assumption was based on al-Ghazali's theory of the purposes of the Law, which came to dominate legal theory in the following centuries. His argument, in short, was that God's leg­islative purpose is maslaha; this purpose is recognizable in the rationes legis of His rulings; and determining maslaha in a legal instance indicates that it is the ratio legis for analogizing.

The previous chapters aimed at reconstructing the contours of this shift toward legal reasoning characterized by a consequentialist ethics. In order to trace the intellectual milieu that facilitated al-Ghazali's theory of the maqasid al-shar!a, the study presented the thought of five leading jurisprudents of the 5th∕11th century - ^tAbd al-Jabbar, al-Basri, al-Dabbusi, al-Shirazi, and al-Juwayni. In contrast to some of the previous works on Muslim ethical theo­ries of the time period by Hourani, Vasalou, Heemskerk, Emon, Shihadeh and others, the questions posed by this study approached the subject matter from the perspective of the sphere of law. It sought to complement the research of Eissa, Farahat, Reinhart, Syed, and Zysow, who look at the interplay of law and theology, though it focused more on individual scholars than contrasting the positions of schools of law and theology.

© KONINKLIJKE BRILL BV, LEIDEN, 2025 | DOI:i0.1163/9789004720787_009 positions of the time period, I hope to have outlined the contours of the shift toward an ethical understanding of legal reasoning - a shift that was neither universal among Muslim jurists nor complete by the 6th/12th century, but that over the centuries prevailed.

While the above focused on the legal theory of these five scholars, they were presented not just chronologically, but also according to their theo­logical worldview - as this turned out to be a significant factor in their con­struction of ethical and legal norms and conceptualization of analogical reasoning. Nevertheless, we find affinities in legal positions between jurists belonging to seemingly incompatible theological persuasions - as the exam­ple of ^tAbd al-Jabbar and al-Juwayni shows - confirming the complex inter­action between law and theology that defies easy categorization. Theological school does not dictate juridical positions, and belonging to the same school of law does not predict one's construction of legal normativity.^[811] The shared vocabulary jurists employ, such as the five-fold scale of legal values or the ter­minology used in describing the procedure of analogy, masks that they often understand and apply these terms quite differently - as evident in the way al-Basri and al-Dabbusi treat efficacy (ta¹thlr). In the environment of disputa­tions (munazarat) that was part of the scholarly experience of the time,^[812] the variety of positions articulated serve as building blocks and springboards on which contemporaneous and future generations of jurists construct their own interpretations of the Law. Nevertheless, when it comes to our jurists' basic approach to discerning norms, their theological worldview was a strong, if not the strongest, explanatory factor of the grounds and criteria by which they construct the ethical and legal status of acts and, though counter-intuitively, also elucidated their approach to identifying the ratio legis of divine rulings.

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