It is, in the example of navigation used above, akin to...

It is, in the example of navigation used above, akin to being fixated on the compass and totally unaware of both the beautiful and awe inspiring scenery on the way and the final destination of the voyage. For on the one hand, the laws of religion are not self-serving and are meant for something beyond themselves, and on the other, these particular laws are just a small subset of the entire corpus of laws that incorporate God’s will for mankind as a whole.

To take the part to be the whole is as great an error as one can make. This is because there exist laws which tell us to look around and see the beauty and majesty of God in the horizons that our ship is slipping through, and in our own selves, as captains of the ship; not to mention the great number of precepts which delineate not only the method and manner of our coexistence with the other passengers on the ship, but order us to get to know them—as this leads to knowledge of ourselves and of God.

In short, Islam is comprehensive and all of its laws taken together give us a beautiful and balanced picture.

Taking any one part and making it bigger than it is gives us a distorted picture and a grotesque caricature of the beauty that God meant for us to experience in the journey to Himself.[^1] Having mentioned the necessity of seeing the whole of Islam—laws and all—to appreciate Islam’s beauty and integrity, it is important to realize that we can not do so immediately and we are, by the nature of things, obligated to start with an empty canvas and to build the final picture piece by piece; every piece being just as important to the whole as any other vis-à-vis the required completeness.

So from this perspective which calls for wholeness, all parts of Islam and hence all parts of Islamic Law, fiqh , gain relatively equal importance. As a result, in principle it is just as important to have knowledge of the section on prayer as it is to be fully aware about the rules of inheritance or to understand the laws relating to slaves.

But we live in the real world of limitations and there are aspects of the Law that pertain to us not only in principle but also in a practical and experiential sense. This means that practically speaking those parts of the Law that are pertinent to us assume a greater importance and we are called to follow them first.