The effect of the human concept on juristic difference

Abstract

Praise be to Allah, and peace and blessings be upon the chosen Prophet, his family and his companions. Having said this: The research deals with the relationship between Islamic jurisprudence and Ilm Al-Kalam (the Islamic scholastic theology) by highlighting one of the scholastic theological principles over which a disagreement occurred among the Muslim scholars of scholastic theology and its schools. The disagreement was namely about what is meant by “human being” is it the soul, the body, or both of them?. This disagreement has impacted some of the jurisprudent branches related to the human self and the effective causes of legal rulings related to it. The disagreement has occurred especially among the Hanafi School, which seems to believe that the soul is intended by the legal ruling, and the Shafi’i school, which recognizes that the legal ruling is related to the body of which the soul is a constituent factor. The instances for such an issue could be: washing wife’s dead body by her husband, the origin of permissibility in marriage, attaching divorce words to wife’s certain organs or suspending divorce and the spread of the effect of analogous punishment inflicted upon a sinner.