Such is the case with prisoners of war...

Such is the case with prisoners of war, slaves, and the like who must abide by the order of their master under pain of coercion and punishment. (iii) A rule of conduct may also be considered to be of divine origin. Our forefathers in different parts of the world at various epochs have continuously believed certain individuals possessed of lofty character to be messengers of God and later generations have inherited this belief.

It goes without saying that of all the superiors' orders those that proceed from God must remain the most meritorious to obey. God's orders, according to religious beliefs, are received through the agency of certain human beings chosen by Him and called by some prophets and incarnations of God by others.

The commandments communicated by such persons are accepted by those who believe them to be the orders of God, the Creator and Master who will judge them all on the Day of Resurrection according to their deeds. (iv) Lastly, there are deductions from and interpretations of basic laws, such as lead to new laws.

Muslim Law is a collection of all the four types of rules mentioned above, viz., rules of customs, orders of superiors, divinely revealed Laws, and the rules arising from the deliberations of jurists.

There is the Qur'an, which is taken as the uncreated Word of God; there is the 1Iadit_h and Sunnah (sayings and doings of the Prophet of Islam) which include not only what the Prophet said or did himself, but also what he tolerated of the existing practices among his , practices coming indeed from pre-Islamic habits and customs.

Moreover, there are individual or unanimous opinions of experts and special­ists (jurists), there are customs which do not go against express laws, and there are foreign laws acted upon on the basis of treaties, reciprocity, and so on and so forth.

Whether the legislators of Islam abolished some old customs and practices, retained and confirmed some others, intact or in a modified form, or took the initiative of ordaining new rules of conduct-the sole principle that guided their legislative activity in all these cases was to “do what is good, and abstain from doing what is evil.” According to al- Ghazali[^1], this principle of good and evil (husn wa qubh) was propounded by the Mu'tazilite jurists.