Towards a Unified Approach to the Shari'ah and Social Inference

Abstract

Forging a new methodology capable of analyzing complicated socialphenomena on the one hand, and facilitating the derivation of rules andconcepts from divine revelation on the other, is one of the paramountconcerns of contemporary Islamic scholarship and the sole concern of thispaper. In dealing with this concern the paper pursues two main themes.First, an attempt is made to underscore the need for reestablishing revelationas a primary source of social theorizing. Second, a primordialmodel of a unified methodological approach for analyzing both revealedtexts and social phenomena is outlined.The first difficulty confronting any attempt to develop an alternativemethodological approach, especially one rooted in Islamic ontology, liesin the exclusion of divine revelation from the realm of science. This exclusionoriginated within the confines of western scientific traditions dueto internal conflict between western religious and scientific communities.While revelation and science were never perceived as mutually exclusivein the Islamic scientific tradition, modern Muslim scholars cannot ignorethe fact that divine revelation is out of place in contemporary scientificactivities. Thus we choose to begin by exploring the grounds for recognizingrevelation as a major soufie of scientific knowledge.The campaign against revealed knowledge, which led to its exclusionfrom western science, consisted of two phases: a) revelation was equatedfilst with ungrounded metaphysics and established as a rival knowledgein contrast to knowledge deemed as true by reason (Locke 1977), and b)it was then asserted, a la Kant (1969), that scientific activity should beconfined to empirical reality, since human reason cannot ascertain transcendentalreality. We argue that scientific activity presupposes ...