This chapter aims to understand the ways in which revelation and divine injunctions have been conceived and implemented by Muslim scholars, who sought to establish norms for deciding the right action and conduct.

The main question that will be tackled in this chapter is whether the Islamic ethico-legal tradition is fully compatible with Divine Command The­ory (henceforth DCT) or is it compatible with some kind of Natural Law Theory (NLT)? I argue that any attempt to identify the nature of Islamic law is problematic, regardless of the fact that many Western and Muslim scholars seem to hold the view that Islamic law is fully compatible with DCT in ethics.

The first section of this chapter investigates the meaning and the implications of DCT associated, in the Islamic tradition, with the Ash'arite school of theology. The second sec­tion attempts to shed light on some conceptual and historical background. It briefly traces the development of the controversy over the meaning of moral values and the use of reason in deriving ethico-legal judgments from the early beginnings until the rise of Ash'arism. In the third section, special attention is given to what I choose to call ‘Common Morality Theory’ (CMT), associated with the Mutazili school of thought and the early Muslim jurists (fuqaha'). The fourth section focuses on ‘Divine Purposes Theory’ commonly known as Maqasid al-Shari 'ah. I argue that the last theory is closer to common morality than to, regard­less of the fact that most of the proponents of the maqasid explicitly endorsed DCT. Thus, the main concern of the last part of this chapter is the position of those who belonged to the Ash'arites, yet in their fiqh and legal theory deviated from the maxims of a classical DCT established by Abu Hasan al-Ash'ari (d. 324/936). The significance of Maqasid al-Shari'ah or the Divine Purposes Theory lies in the fact that many contemporary Muslim reformers rely on this theory in their efforts to reform Islamic law.

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