Book Description

With the end of the early Islamic period, Muslim scholars came to sense that a rift had begun to ‎emerge between the teachings and principles of Islam and Muslims’ daily reality and practices. The ‎most important means by which scholars sought to restore the intimate contact between Muslims ‎and the Qur’an was to study the objectives of Islam, the causes behind Islamic legal rulings and the ‎intentions and goals underlying the Shari'ah, or Islamic Law. They made it clear that every legal ‎ruling in Islam has a function which it performs, an aim which it realizes, a cause, be it explicit or ‎implicit, and an intention which it seeks to fulfill, and all of this in order to realize benefit to human ‎beings or to ward off harm or corruption. They showed how these intentions, and higher objectives ‎might at times be contained explicitly in the texts of the Qur’an and the Sunnah, while at other ‎times, scholars might bring them to light by means of independent reasoning based on their ‎understanding of the Qur’an and the Sunnah within a framework of time and space.‎ This book represents a pioneering contribution presenting a comprehensive theory of the objectives ‎of Islamic law in its various aspects, as well as a painstaking study of objectives-based thought as ‎pioneered by the father of objectives-based jurisprudence, Imam Abu Ishaq al-Shatibi; in addition, ‎the author presents us with an important study of al-Shatibi himself which offers a wealth of new, ‎beneficial information about the life, thought and method of this venerable man.‎