Twelfth International Conference on Religion & Spirituality in Society

Abstract

My research examines modern and contemporary scholars’ framing of the higher objectives of the Sharīʿa, based on Abu Ishaq Ibrahim al-Shāṭibī’s theory of maqāṣid. Al-Shāṭibī (d.1388), an Andalusian jurist of the Maliki branch of Islam, has particular importance for modernist scholars. In the twentieth century, the concepts of maslaha (public interest) and maqāṣid al-Sharīʿa (the higher objectives of the Sharīʿa) were a particular focus of Islamic legal reformers. While al-Shāṭibī’s maqāṣid theory was rarely used in the pre-modern period, his ideas were resurrected by Muhammad Abduh (d.1905), who was the first to lay down modernist ideas based on al-Shāṭibī’s Muwāfaqāt, a book he recommended to his students. After him, al-Shāṭibī gained popularity among twentieth-century scholars around the Muslim world, alongside repeated formulations of revival and reform in Islamic Legal Theory. These modern adaptations of al-Shāṭibī’s maqāṣid theory have rarely been subject to the scrutiny of academic scholarship. This paper investigates the way that contemporary thinkers interpret al-Shāṭibī’s maqāṣid theory to extend Sharīʿa rules for different purposes, particularly political. This w study provides a historical analysis of the different modern approaches to al-Shāṭibī’s maqāṣid theory, considering revival and reformist movements that have been influential on the intellectual genealogies of five key scholars; Fazlur Rahman (1919- 1988), Aḥmad al-Raysūnī, Yusuf al- Qaraḍāwi (b.1926), Muhammad Hashim Kamali (b.1944) and Muhammad Khalid Masud’s (b.1939).