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

Abstract

Forging a new methodology capable of analyzing complicated social phenomena on the one hand, and facilitating the derivation of rules and concepts from divine revelation on the other, is one of the paramount concerns of contemporary Islamic scholarship and the sole concern of this paper. In dealing with this concern the paper pursues two main themes. First, an attempt is made to underscore the need for reestablishing revelation as a primary source of social theorizing. Second, a primordial model of a unified methodological approach for analyzing both revealed texts and social phenomena is outlined. The first difficulty confronting any attempt to develop an alternative methodological approach, especially one rooted in Islamic ontology, lies in the exclusion of divine revelation from the realm of science. This exclusion originated within the confines of western scientific traditions due to internal conflict between western religious and scientific communities. While revelation and science were never perceived as mutually exclusive in the Islamic scientific tradition, modern Muslim scholars cannot ignore the fact that divine revelation is out of place in contemporary scientific activities. Thus we choose to begin by exploring the grounds for recognizing revelation as a major soufie of scientific knowledge. The campaign against revealed knowledge, which led to its exclusion from western science, consisted of two phases: a) revelation was equated filst with ungrounded metaphysics and established as a rival knowledge in contrast to knowledge deemed as true by reason (Locke 1977), and b) it was then asserted, a la Kant (1969), that scientific activity should be confined to empirical reality, since human reason cannot ascertain transcendental reality. We argue that scientific activity presupposes ...