ভূমিকা

Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books The Heart of Islam: Enduring Values For Humanity CHAPTER THREE: DIVINE AND HUMAN LAWS And now We have set thee (O Muhammad) on a clear road (Shar‘) of Our Commandment; so follow it, and follow not the whim of those who know not. Quran 45:18 It is the Law of God which has taken course aforetime. Thou wilt not find any change in the Law of God.

Quran 48:23 THE PHILOSOPHY OF LAW IN ISLAM One of the most difficult aspects of Islam to understand for modern Westerners is the “philosophy of law,” which provides the conceptual foundation for the Shari‘ah (literally, “road” or “path”), or Divine Law, in Islam.

Since Christ did not promulgate a law like those of the prophets of the Old Testament and the Prophet of Islam, but rather came to break the letter of the law in the name of the Spirit, religious law in the West developed in a very different manner than it did in Islam. Even during the Middle Ages, when Western society was thoroughly Christian, everyday laws were drawn from Roman sources or common law.

These sources were clearly distinguished from Divine Law, which in the Christian context involved spiritual principles and not ordinary laws dealing with society in general. Moreover, Christian theologians developed an elaborate doctrine of natural law, which does not have an exact counterpart in Islam, although there are striking developments worthy of comparison in this domain within the two traditions.

Originally, natural law meant a system of rights or justice common to all human beings and derived from nature. St. Thomas Aquinas provided the greatest elaboration of this concept, stating that eternal law exists in God’s mind and is known to us only in part through revelation and in part through reason. For St.

Thomas, the law of nature is the “participation of the eternal law in the rational creature.” Human law, based on precepts that human beings can derive by their own reason, must be a particular application of that law. Now, although Muslim theologians also debated among themselves whether our God-given reason can know the good without revelation, they did not develop a theory of natural law such as one finds in Thomism.

Their view was closer to that of John Duns Scotus and Francisco Suarez, who believed that the Divine Will, rather than reason, was the source of law.