Finding God and Humanity in Language: Islamic Legal Assessments as the Meeting Point of the Divine and Human

Abstract

For as long as Western scholars have studied Islamic law, they have struggled to understand the relations between its and aspects. This chapter joins these efforts in exploring the details of the juristic integration of religious and legal concerns. The argument is that pre-modern Muslim jurists' understandings of the nature of language, including divine speech, displays important continuities with jurists' understanding of the nature of human action as encompassed by language. The rules of Islamic law are a meeting point - for jurists - between the divine and the human, a meeting that takes place in the realm of language. Jurists had a two-part task both of discerning, in the words of the revealed texts, God's intentions and rules governing human actions, and of identifying human actions by assigning to them names, and thus lining up the words of God's rules with the words naming human actions. Keywords: divine speech; God; human action; Islamic law; legal concern; pre-modern Muslim jurists; religious concern; Western scholars