Discuss/illustrate the development of Islamic ethics in the Qur’an and in Muhammad’s life an example. How do they relate to pre-Islamic ethics? Why and how should Muslims act according to these sources?

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Discuss/illustrate the development of Islamic ethics in the Qur’an and in Muhammad’s life an example. How do they relate to pre-Islamic ethics? Why and how should Muslims act according to these sources?   

MUSLIM ETHICS:
SOURCES, INTERPRETATIONS AND

CHALLENGES

Islam’s potential as a positive moral force in the twentieth century has
not infrequently been called into question by Western observers, casual
and professional alike. When such doubts are expressed, they appear to
arise largely from two sources: first, the belief that the generality of
Muslims, under the burden of centuries of ethical determinism, live a
life of uninspired acquiescence in the dispensations of Fate; second, the
suspicion that Islam has only served to tighten the grip of traditionalism
on numerous third world nations, thus rendering them incapable of
responding to either the demands or the benefits of technology. In
response, some Muslim modernists have gone to the other extreme to
demonstrate that, in fact, Islam has virtually invented the qualities of
initiative and adaptability. Somewhere in between lies a point at which
mutual understanding may begin to grow.

It is surely presumptuous to address so vast an issue in so small a
space as this; but some general outlines of the backgrounds, themes,
and principles of the Islamic moral genius may at least be suggested.
First, a look at the classic sources will sum up the crucial features of the
socio-moral climate in which the Prophet Muhammad began his mis-
sion, and highlight the salient ethical notes of the Qur3an—the criteria,
motives, and conditions of Quranic morality. A brief discussion of
Hadïth will furnish a bridge between the sources and the three principal
modes in which those sources have been interpreted in the history of
Islam: the traditionalist, the rationalist, and the personalist. Finally,
some observations will be offered as to how those sources and inter-
pretations have confronted, or may yet address themselves to, matters
of faith and justice in our time.

SOURCES

Two sources flowed together in the beginning of Islam to form the
wellspring of Muslim ethics. They were the indigenous and the revealed:
the socio-moral climate of Arabia and the corrective of Qur5anic
monotheism. The first may be conveniently described under the
headings of community, world view, and the virtuous Arab. In each in-
stance the Quran’s response to the prevailing situation will be noted;
then we will examine more explicitly the internal workings of the ethics
of theQur’än.1

1 Throughout this section on “sources,”

I

have relied heavily on the following: Daud
Rahbar, God of Justice: Λ Study in the Ethical Doctrine of the Qurtn (Leiden: Brill,

163

164 THE MUSLIM WORLD

Arab social ethics in Muhammad’s time revolved around tribal struc-
tures. A few fundamental intertribal and intratribal features are impor-
tant to note here. First, the tribe was not a permanent entity; it could
dwindle and vanish altogether, or burgeon and split into new groups.
Balance of power among the tribes could be approximated only through
the constant threat, if not the ongoing practice, of blood-feud.
Cooperation among tribes occurred either through a solidarity pact at
the tribal level (hilf) or by a grant of sanctuary and honorary member-
ship for an individual (jiwär). Muhammad’s task of further uniting the
tribes was to be facilitated also by unity of language.

Within the individual tribe, the fiercest of loyalties, unquestioning in
its commitment and unbridled in its response to external aggression, was
the keystone of morality. Breach of this ca$abiyya from within met with
an equally unreasoning ostracism. A traitor was declared “cut off”
(khati^, no longer under the tribe’s protection and thenceforth liable to
his own tribe’s vengeance. When Muhammad spoke out against his own
Quraysh tribespeople he was labeled an outcast by some of them. Mean-
while, the clan of Banü Häshim continued to consider the Prophet their
own. Had they, too, disowned him, Muhammad would not have lived
to go on preaching that faith is thicker than blood (S. 80:33-37; 58:22).

Over against traditional tribal structures, however, the phenomenon
of individualism appears to have been on the rise, due to the establish-
ment of a trading economy in an increasingly populous Mecca. Move-
ment from a nomadic to an urban environment made possible private
financial resources, which in turn allowed fiscal independence and,
hence, the breakdown of society into smaller units. In the desert, no one
could survive apart from the tribe. In the city, survival of families was
no longer out of the question. Before Muhammad’s era, the value of an
individual’s deeds had been subsumed into the collectivity: it was the
tribe’s honor and bravery that upheld the mores (sunna) of the group.
As the tribe lived on, so did the individual. Increasing individualism
gradually took its toll on the sense of communal longevity. The ‘immor-
tality’ of the groups yielded to the immortality of hoarding.

The Quran’s response to the resulting situation in Mecca is clear and

I960); Toshiku Izutsu, Ethico-Religious Concepts in the Qur^an (Montreal: McGill
University Press, 1966); Toshiku Izutsu, God and Man in the Koran (Tokyo: Keio Univer-
sity Press, 1964); Robert Roberts, Social Laws of the Qoran (London: Williams and
Norgate, 1925); Helmer Ringgren, Studies in Arabian Fatalism (Wiesbaden:
Harrassowitz, 1955); Dwight M. Donaldson, Studies in Muslim Ethics (London: SPCK,
1953); R. Levy, The Social Structure of Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1971); Kenneth Cragg, The Mind of the Qurtn (London: Allen and Unwin, 1973); W.
Montgomery Watt, Muhammad at Mecca and Muhammad at Medina (Oxford: Claren-
don Press, 1953, 1956).

MUSLIM ETHICS 165

forthright. Wealth is not owned, but on loan, given over to mankind’s
stewardship. It is a temporary possession which cannot immortalize its
holders. Muhammad preached against the stratification of society into
rich and poor classes, without, however, advocating a revival of tribal
loyalty. The individual had rather to be seen in the total context of
society at large. Tribal loyalties must be replaced by a consciousness of
common humanity sprung from Adam’s clay.

Central to the ethical world view of seventh-century Arabia were the
notions of time, or destiny, and custom. Life was purely a this-worldly
proposition, governed by an unfeeling Time which eventually destroyed
all things as the Zephyr effaces every vestige of a campsite. Hope of
living forever was severely abridged. Wealth was squandered in the
hope that extravagance might purchase reputation. In any case, Time
had prearranged the four fundamentals: sustenance, the sex of children,
happiness or misery, and length of days. In the face of such deter-
minism, a kind of ‘hedonistic calculus’ became the standard of personal
morality. As Toshiku Izutsu indicates, there was indeed a more
demanding communal ethic; but it had no “consistent, theoretical
basis.”2 Group action always conformed to the ancestral custom
(sunna) of assisting members of the tribe or confederation without
reference to the Objective’ morality of the action to be defended or of
the response to be made.

By way of rebuttal, the Qur5an spoke not of uncritical custom, but of
the purposeful will of God; not of seeking honor and avoiding shame in
this life, but of seeking reward and avoiding punishment in the next.
Life forever (khulQd) cannot be had on earth; but one need not despair,
for there is more. Judgment replaced hedonism with responsibility.
Finally, according to Izutsu, the Qur5än retranslated the key moral-
value word karlm (noble): before Islam the word had denoted a person
of thoughtless generosity and extravagance; according to the Qur°an,
the true kafîm, literally: “the noblest of all” (akram) was the one who
was “most God-fearing” (S. 49:13).3

In a similar way, the Holy Book would transform other value-terms
into words capable of denoting characteristically Muslim virtues. Islam
disciplined the pre-Islamic virtue of courage, refashioning it from a
disconnected and purposeless bravery into fortitude “in the way of
God.” Generosity was redirected from sheer display toward “spending
in the way of God,” meant for those in genuine need and founded, not
on prodigality, but on wise stewardship of God’s bounty. Loyalty’s
focus was shifted from the tribe to the Creator, so that the virtue

2 Ethico-Religious Concepts, p. 45.
3 Ibid., pp. 53-54, 76-79.

166 THE MUSLIM WORLD

became a Covenanted response to, and acknowledgment of, the Reality
of God. Not that pre-Islamic society was a moral vacuum. Montgomery
Watt writes:

In the furnace of the desert the dross of inferior attitudes and ac-
tions was burned out and the pure gold left of a high morality, a
high code and tradition of human relationships, and a high level
of human excellence.4

However, the Qw°än views pre-Islamic society as characterized by jahl,
referring to it as jcihiliyya, “a certain psychological state” rooted in
“the keenest sense of tribal honor, the unyielding spirit of rivalry and
arrogance.”5 Jahl, capricious and unreflective, had as its opposite Mm,
moral reasonableness, tranquility of the soul. But while considered a
lofty virtue, it needed, as suggested earlier, a more solid “motivational
basis.” Islam is based on a realistic self-appraisal before God that
prompts grateful service, while jahl is arrogant and self-serving. The
Qur^än refers to the transformation from jahl to Islam as a “steep as-
cent” through a mountain pass:

Ah, what will convey unto thee what the Ascent is!—
(It is) to free a slave,
And to feed in the day of hunger
An orphan near of kin,
Or some poor wretch in misery,
And to be of those who believe and exhort one another to perse-

verance and exhort one another to pity.
Their place will be on the right hand.
But those who disbelieve Our revelations, their place will be on the

left hand. (S. 90:12-19, Pickthall)

Three principles enshrined in the QurDän are meant to aid believers in
that steep ascent. They are the double criterion of Islam versus in-
gratitude; the motive of Fear of God; and the twofold condition of
divine initiative and human freedom. Grateful response to the largesse
of the Creator is the measure of all action in Islam. Over against
thankfulness (shukr) stands the gravest of all injustices (shirk), in-
cluding any and all responses that imply that “other than God” is the
source of life. All actions are reducible to one or the other of the polar
attitudes of Islam and ingratitude, of those who “believe and do good
works” on the one hand, and on the other of those who refuse to
acknowledge the Giver and who ascribe all generosity to themselves.

4 Muhammad at Mecca y pp. 22-23.
5 Izutsu, Ethico-Religious Concepts, pp. 28-29.

MUSLIM ETHICS 167

Those who “believe and do good works” do so out of Fear of God.6

They do not cower and cringe as before a tyrant. Rather is their fear
born of a certainty that their every action will bear fruit in its kind
before God’s justice, not so much because of what God will do, as
because God is. God is utterly merciful, but His mercy appears as a kind
of prior grace and warning in the Signs of creation. Be the Signs blithely
ignored or taken to heart, justice will follow. At the Judgment, all who
have denied the Signs of Mercy will already have condemned
themselves. Further clarifying the concept of Fear of God, Daud
Rahbar maintains that love for God does not function as an ethical
motive in the Qur?an. Neither is God said to love humanity uncondi-
tionally. Fear of God is not, however, to be taken as an ‘impersonal’
motive, for it has everything to do with the right relationship between
Creator and creature. Numerous texts in the Qur5an speak of the need
to “guard oneself fearfully,” that is, not to “regard oneself as pure” (S.
53:32), not to act presumptuously and rebelliously (S. 96:6). One might
say that the Fear of God is prior to Islam. Fear is the beginning of faith,
which in turn is the source of ethical conduct.

Morality is never a question either of God’s initiative alone or of
human freedom alone. God’s action is, of course, antecedent; but the
Creator has not made light of His creatures by compelling their response
one way or the other. On the other hand, whatever human beings do,
they are responding willy-nilly to the initiative of God. The Qw°an,
understood as a whole, maintains a clear balance and proportion be-
tween these two conditions of morality, though many apparently am-
biguous texts have often been misread as an almost complete denial of
mankind’s ethical response. Five points are offered here as a tentative
clarification of some of those ambiguities.

First of all, the Qur?an depicts creation as a Trust offered initially to
the Heavens and the Earth. They were afraid to accept the Trust, but
humanity accepted it, even though (or perhaps because?) mankind was
sinful and foolish (S. 33:72). When God informed the angels that He
was about to put His vicegerent Adam on earth, they warned the
Creator that mankind would be unjust and would shed blood. God
assured the angels that He knew what He was about (S. 2:30); for the
seed of Adam had acknowledged God as their Lord, and they had done
so in full knowledge of the coming Judgment and Resurrection (S.
7:172).

That God knew well the risk involved in giving humanity free choice

6 Cf. Rahbar, God of Justice, Ch. 18, “The Essential Motive Principle of Virtuous
Conduct in Quranic Thought,” pp. 179-193.

168 THE MUSLIM WORLD

is evident from the ubiquitous Quranic “perhaps” (lacalla). As Ken-
neth Cragg indicates,7 the word is usually followed by verbs of knowing,
recognizing, understanding, thanking, being reverent—always in con-
junction with God’s Signs and with reference both to creation and to the
verses (Qyät) of the Qw°an. Everything in creation unfolds before
humankind. “If only” they would see the Signs; “perhaps” they would
respond in gratitude. Perhaps not.

Concerning the nature of God’s will, D. Rahbar contributes a third
point. The language of the Qur̂ an is highly rhetorical and hence open to
misinterpretation. Quranic statements are not meant to be taken
metaphysically or as having any philosophical axe to grind. Taken
together, the texts teach that the divine “will” is indeed all-
encompassing, but it neither constrains nor predetermines. “God does
not change a people’s estate till they change their own heart’s thoughts”
(S. 13:11). Rahbar draws three specific conclusions: First, God’s will is
not enacted on whim or caprice; it is purposeful, wise, discriminating.
In short, God is no despot. Second, texts which speak of God’s doing
“what He wills” to “whom He wills” refer primarily to God’s limitless
power which is to be glorified. Finally, “God’s will is sometimes men-
tioned in the same breath with His Kinghood and His permission,” in-
dicating that the “except God will” notion is to be understood
rhetorically and not metaphysically. Rahbar sums up by saying that
God “works His will in guiding men’s dispositions upon their will-
ingness to be guided, and that He works His will in leading them into er-
ror when they stubbornly defy His ordinances.”8

So frequent in the Qw°an is the call to “seek forgiveness,”9 that it is
nearly impossible to doubt the Book’s insistence on human freedom. No
one who acts unfreely need ask forgiveness, either of the God who has
fixed his destiny or of the people whose fate it has been to be wronged
by him. Seeking forgiveness is nevertheless at the very center of
QurDanic ethics. In addition to implying an acknowledgment of personal
responsibility, seeking forgiveness is the first step toward becoming
receptive to the experience of God’s mercy, and hence toward the fur-
therance of good conduct in grateful response to the Signs that are
God’s mercy, and so forth. Moral growth is an ascending spiral.

Finally, Islam’s ethics is an historically conditioned one. Those who
respond gratefully will be vindicated by the end of history, as heralded
by a succession of warning prophets who have all along presented
mankind with the basic moral option on the basis of their prophetic in-

7 Mind of the Qur^an, pp. 75-92, 152-53.
8 Rahbar, God of Justice, pp. 82-84.
9 Cf. Cragg, Mind of the QurVn, pp. 110-28.

MUSLIM ETHICS 169

terpretation of the Signs. The fact of impending Judgment, like the call
to forgiveness, implies human responsibility. Accountability without
freedom is a sham. Human responsibility dates to the acceptance of the
Trust in full expectation of the Day when “every soul will know what it
has done” (S. 81:14).

Muhammad was clearly a man of his own time in many ways. How-
ever, pre-Islamic morality has been discussed here as a “source” of
Muslim ethics less as directly formative of Islamic values than as the
general ethical climate to which the Qur5an responded so vigorously and
as the raw material which the Prophet would attempt to reshape.

INTERPRETATIONS

Immediately after the death of the Prophet, recollections of his words
and deeds began to form a bridge between the sources we have been
discussing and the institutionalized interpretations that were to evolve
during the eighth and ninth centuries. Hadïth became the link between
the descriptive guidance of the Qur5an and the prescriptive norms of
fiqh (legal science), between the ethical and the legal. Muhammad’s
conduct was the obvious choice for a moral touchstone in cases not ex-
plicitly treated in the Qur5an. “Personal judgment” or “opinion” (ra^y)
needed to be anchored in, and subject to the critique of, the Prophet’s
sunna as preserved in the collective memory of the Community. Fazlur
Rahman has articulated several features of Hadïth development that are
important in this context.10 First of all, the Community hesitated ini-
tially to commit the Prophetic sunna to writing because they feared
possible confusion of Hadïth with the Qur5anic text, and/or because of
the very specific applicability of the decisions exemplified in a given
hadïth. As the community grew, however, its needs changed, as did the
de facto moral practice of the Community. Their actual practice was
still felt to be consonant with the imitation of the Prophet. Hence the
term sunna, originally reserved to the behavior of Muhammad, came to
mean also the “actual practice” of Muslims. Further need to regulate
that practice in detail while continuing to attend to new exigencies
covered neither in Qw°an nor Hadïth gave rise to a third meaning of
sunna: specific ruling deduced by more or less conscious analogy.
Sunna as ideal ethical norm and consensus (ijma°) as actual conduct
therefore gradually merged through the implicit agency of analogical
reasoning (giyäs). Sensing the dangerous possibility that the Prophetic
sunna might thus be evacuated of normative force through coalescence

10 Islam (New York: Doubleday [Anchor paperback], 1966), pp. 43 ff.

170 THE MUSLIM WORLD

with living practice, al-Shaficï (d. 819) moved toward defining a sure
and objective standard of ethics. His insistence that every moral deci-
sion be shored up by reference to a hadïth (rather than by reliance on
analogy) unfortunately set up the double threat of the cessation of
creative theological activity on the one hand, and the fabrication of
hadïths on the other. Both threats came to pass: theology became a
repetitive exercise and the actual sunna of the Community gradually
found its way into Hadïth.

Two clarifications need to be made here concerning Hadïth as source
of ethical behavior and Hadïth as interpretation and “ethical polemic.”
The one has to do with the first half of the fundamental ethical tension
in Islam between the search for an individual behavior-model and the
need for societal norms. (The second half of the tension will be treated
shortly.) As source, the Hadïth holds up the Prophet as a moral
paradigm. As such the traditions were a kind of “mirror for
everyman,” whose binding force took the form of a personal allegiance
to the Prophet, an allegiance recommended by true belief but not yet
possessing the more generalized force of law. A second point has to do
with Hadïth as a tool of the determinists. Numerous traditions represent
a highly selective reading of the Qur̂ an and are evidently based only on
those texts which, when taken out of context, support the denial of
human freedom and responsibility. Of such hadïths Helmer Ringgren
writes:

The traditions emphasized the divine power and tried to determine
its effects and its extent in various details of human life, spiritual as
well as physical. Partly those traditions are conditioned by the
theological discussions of the first centuries after the higrah, partly
they mark a gradual penetration of pre-Islamic fatalistic thoughts
into the doctrine of Islam.11

Roughly contemporaneous with the growth of tradition-science was
the evolution of legal method. By around 800, two different emphases
had begun to take shape. Qur?an and Sunna were agreed to be the bases
of moral behavior, but opinions varied as to how to interpret the
sources. Malik b. Anas of Medina (d. 795) leaned toward a kind of con-
sensus or ‘agreed practice,’ while Abu Hanïfa of Küfa (d. 767) tended
more toward the explicit use of analogical reasoning. Al-Shaficï had
studied under both Malik and Shaybanï, a student of Abu Hanïfa, and

11 Studies in Arabian Fatalism, p. 192; cf. also Rahman, Islam, p. 299, and W. Mont-
gomery Watt, Freewill and Predestination in Early Islam (London: Luzac & Co., 1948)
and his The Formative Period of Islamic Thought (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 1973), esp. Ch. IV, pp. 82-118.

MUSLIM ETHICS 171

opted for a middle path. His legal method would include both the com-
munitarian emphasis of Malik (ijmQ°) and the more rationalist-
individualized element of Abu Hanifa’s school (now in the form of
qiyäs). Al-Shaficï, however, would give consensus decided priority over
analogical reasoning. Ibn Hanbal (d. 857) would later take to its ex-
treme al-Shaficï’s claim that the Sunna could be found only in Hadïth.
Discarding both consensus and analogy, Ibn Hanbal eliminated any
possibility that personal preference or changing community needs might
be adduced as a justification for straying from the Qur̂ an and Sunna.
Shortly after Ibn Hanbal’s time, the “Door of Original Thinking”
(ijtihüd) creaked to a close. Muslim ethics had been institutionalized
with a vengeance. Orthodox* legalism cast its long shadow over most of
the Islamic world.12 With its concern for argument from authority and
uniformity of practice, the traditionalist position had ousted from the
fold of orthodoxy the other two important types of ethics: the ra-
tionalist and the personalist.

At the risk of oversimplification, the three main lines of classical and
medieval ethical interpretation may be broadly characterized as follows.
Traditionalist ethics taught that a given action was to be considered evil
precisely because God had forbidden it. It emphasized correct action in
accord with Revelation as received in faith by the Community and as
known to all through Islam’s duly constituted teaching scholars. As to
the source of ethical legitimation the position was transcendentalist. In
the faith-works arena, it was activist, opting for works over faith. Its
ethic was societal rather than personal in that the Community’s con-
certed actioh was regarded as a major encouragement and support. For
a variety of Reasons, social and political, the traditionalist approach was
heavily deterministic.

For the rationalist ethician, any action which could be judged in-
herently evii must therefore be forbidden by God. Correct thought was
the goal, knowledge in accord with reason, all leading to virtue. The ra-
tionalist wafe immanentistic, looking ‘within’ things for the immutable
principles ubon which value rests essentially. Convinced that freedom is
part and parcel of humanity, this type of ethics even went to the extreme

12 On Islamic legal developments, cf. Josef Schacht, An Introduction to Islamic Law
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964) and The Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950); Rahman, Islam, pp. 75 ff.; R. M. Savory, “Law and
Traditional Society,” in Islamic Civilization, ed. R. M. Savory (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1976); Duncan Black Macdonald, The Development of Muslim
Theology, Jurisprudence, and Constitutional Theory (New York: Scribner, 1903); Noel J.
Coulson, A History of Islamic Law, Islamic Surveys Series, No. 2 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Pre$s, 1965); Levy, Social Structure of Islam, pp. 175 ff.

172 THE MUSLIM WORLD

of determining God in order to safeguard human initiative and respon-
sibility.13

According to personalist ethics, represented chiefly by the Son
mystical poets, a specific action could be good or evil as judged in terms
of a further end, namely, closeness to God. So, for example, Moses was
acquitted of the least wrongdoing in the murder of the Copt; and Khidr
(Moses* unnamed guide in S. 18) was highly praised for a series of for-
mally indefensible actions recorded in scripture. Purity of heart and in-
tention were the goal. Action could be legitimated on the basis of some
special intuition or esoteric knowledge. Such privileged moral guidance
derived only from God, but the personalist approach was neither
precisely transcendentalist (as was the traditionalist) nor exclusively im-
manentist (as the rationalist). The personalist tended toward quietism,
valuing faith over works. It looked for ‘moral support’ not so much
from acting in concert as from the individual’s being sustained by a rela-
tionship with God. Although the clearly pantheistic thinkers espoused a
blatant determinism, personalism was by no means totally engulfed in
determinism. As influential a writer as Jaläl al-Dîn Rumï (1207-73)
steadfastly maintained both divine and human freedom, teaching that
though one must ultimately become God’s slave to be a true believer,
one is not compelled in the process. The seeker may freely reject God’s
grace and can become God’s slave only by freely relinquishing his free
will.14

On the basis of this brief survey of the outlines of classical and
medieval ethical developments, the following conclusions can be set
forth. First, insofar as the Hadïth literature presents the Prophet as an
ethical paradigm, the Hadïth can be regarded as a primary source of
Muslim ethics. That the textual content of the traditions was never con-
sidered liable to critical scrutiny implies complete trust that whatever the
Prophet said or did, it was to be considered worthy of imitation. Insofar
as large segments of Hadïth are, in Rahman’s words, “uncompromis-

13 George Hourani devoted a number of significant publications to this subject,
especially Islamic Rationalism: The Ethics of cAbd al-Jabbär (Oxford: The Clarendon
Press, 1971); “Juwayni’s Criticism of Muctazilite Ethics,” The Muslim World, LXV
(1975), 161-73; “Two Theories of Value in Medieval Islam,” M.W., L (1960), 269-78;
“Ghazali on the Ethics of Action,” JAOS, XCVI (1976), 69-88; “The Rationalist Ethics
of cAbd al-Jabbar,” in Islamic Philosophy and the Classical Tradition (Richard Walzer
Festschrift) (Oxford: Cassirer, 1972), pp. 105-15; “Ethics in Medieval Islam: A Conspec-
tus,” in Essays on Islamic Philosophy and Science, ed. George Hourani (Albany: SUNY
Press, 1975), pp. 128-35. See also Muhammad Umaruddin, The Ethical Philosophy ofal-
Ghazzali (Aligarh, 1951); Franz Rosenthal, The Muslim Concept of Freedom (Leiden:
E. J. Brill, 1960); Richard Walzer, Greek into Arabic: Essays in Islamic Philosophy
(Oxford: Cassirer, 1972), pp. 142-63, 220-35.

14 Cf. Masnavi (Nicholson’s translation), Bk. Ill, 2900 ff., Bk. IV, 401-5.

MUSLIM ETHICS 173

ingly deterministic,”15 they must be viewed as interpretation and not of
a piece with the Quran’s more balanced picture. Second, and from a
slightly different angle, the very fact of Hadïth implies an interest in a
personal ethibs whereby each individual is encouraged to imitate the
Prophet. At ihe sanie time, the method of Hadïth development and in-
terpretation implies an equally strong social bias in ethics, based on
strong faith \n the trustworthiness of the Community as transmitter.
That communitarian bias allowed society to legitimate the survival of
ethical norms through isnöd criticism, i.e., the process of pronouncing
scores of individual transmitters to be credible repositories of moral
value. Third, early preference for ijmQc over qiyäs further underscores a
faith in the Community, acting in good faith, as the custodian of
morals.16 The initial retention of qiyäs in whatever way by three of the
four chief law schools meant that, at least in theory, even a rationalist
interpretation was to be considered orthodox. By 900, however, with the
‘closing of the door,’ qiyäs had scarcely reached its hundredth year as a
formally accepted principle when it was effectively decommissioned. By
900 the three main elements of orthodox ethics had been assembled:
Hadïth, legal method, dominant law schools. As a result of that
finalization, very little flexibility of interpretation remained for anyone
who cared to be considered strictly orthodox. The rationalist and per-
sonalist options went on to develop more or less beyond the pale. They
were to remain suspect, for reason threatened to abrogate the need for
Revelation and, hence, for Divine law; and personalism held out the
constant danger of antinomianism.

CHALLENGES

Even though many important aspects of the rationalist and per-
sonalist approaches were never acceptable to mainstream Islam, it was
precisely the two peripheral options which would provide essential
stimuli to self-critique and reform in modern times. In the form of
¡§üfism and Western liberal thought, the two types of ethics have
typified in a general way the broader range of challenges facing contem-
porary Islam both from within and from abroad.

Various judgments have been passed on the impact of Sofism in the
history of Islam. Positively, some have found in Cüfism a liberation

15 Rahman, Islam, p. 299.
16 Cf. Ahmad Hasan, “A Comparative Study of Ijmac: Sangha, Sanhédrin and

Church,” Islamic Studies, XI (1972), 251-79; Camille Mansour, L’Autorité dans la pensée
Musulmane (Paris: J. Vrin, 1975); Seyyid Hosein Nasr, Islamic Studies (Beirut: Librairie
du Liban, 1967), pp. 6-34 (on authority, secularism, and personal law).

I

174 THE MUSLIM WORLD

from the tyranny of formalism. Negatively, some have seen the pan-
theistic aftermath of speculative Sofism as a moral wasteland, “far
more injurious ethically than perhaps any doctrine conceivable,
obliterating, as it does, the very distinction between good and evil.”17

Nevertheless, from roughly the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries,
wherever there were movement and change within Islam, Süfism was
there to expand the frontiers with its appeal to masses of people. No seg-
ment of Muslim society could realistically ignore the dynamism of
Süfism. Its eventual stagnation was perhaps only slightly less obvious.
Among modern reformers, both those who sought to revitalize Süfism
and those who sought to excise it entirely from Islam, almost all admit
to having considered themselves Suits at some time in their lives. From
cAbd al-Wahhäb (1703-92), who repudiated his Süß roots, to Shäh Watt
Allah (1702-62), who sought to deepen his, eighteenth-century ethical
developments centered around a reemphasis on the ‘Social Qur̂ än’ and
a rediscovery of Prophetic activism.

Muslim modernists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
sought to respond to the moral challenge that encroached from outside.
Implicit in the rationalist challenge was the charge that the fundamen-
talism prompted in the eighteenth century by a sense of theological
responsibility was tantamount to social irresponsibility in the dawn of
the industrial age. The charge was met by the gradual articulation of the
key modernist ethical principles: that there is ample room within the
Islamic world view for all the fruits of human ingenuity; and that Islam
is preeminently light on its feet and capable of moral leadership.

Modernist ethics represents a general trend away from determinism
and toward a struggle for social justice. Four factors are involved: First,
an increasingly this-worldly focus as embodied in such reforms as the
Wahhabï. Second, a concurrent shift from dependence on authority
(taqttd) for moral guidance to a reinterpretation of the sources in the
light of new community needs. Third, a “populist humanism” injected
into politics by the likes of Jamal al-Dïn al-Afghani (1839-97). And
finally, the overall effect of increased input from science and
rationalism in the direction of an emphasis on human capability and
initiative.18

17 Rahman, Islam, p. 302.
18 Cf. Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Islam in Modern History (Princeton: Princeton Univer-

sity Press, 1957), pp. 41-92; Rahman, Islam, pp. 236-89; Kenneth Cragg, The House of
Islam (Encino, Calif.: Dickenson Publishing Co., 1975), pp. 109-25; H.A.R. Gibb,
Mohammedanism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949), pp. 113-31; Amir Ali, The
Spirit of Islam (London: Christophers, 1955), pp. 139 ff.; J.M.S. Baljon, Modern Muslim
Koran Interpretation (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1968), pp. 111-20.

MUSLIM ETHICS 175

Competition with the modernist position has by no means been want-
ing. At the two extremes stand the conservative view, that all the data of
thirteen centuries of legal-moral activity are of nearly homogeneous
authority; and the secularist view, that “relegates religious principles to
the realm of the individual conscience, and allows the forces of society
an unfettered control over the shape of the law.”19 Perhaps no less ex-
treme in a different direction is the fundamentalist/revivalist position,
which would deny altogether the heritage of over a millennium, return
to the earliest sources as ‘unaltered’ by later interpretation, and strive to
reenact the past. Modernism attempts to take a position between the
fundamentalist and the secularist.20 As to the acceptability of modernist
attempts to reinterpret the sources, Norman J. Coulson remarks:

Strict theorists may, and indeed do, object to the activities of the
reformers on the ground that the interpretation of the divine texts
should be purely objective, while so-called modern “ijtihäd”
amounts to little more than forcing from the divine texts that
particular interpretation which agrees with preconceived standards
subjectively determined. Yet legal history shows that current social
conditions had exercised a predominant influence in the formative
period of Islamic jurisprudence and that, whatever the classical
theory of law might maintain, the early jurists had in fact inter-
preted the Qur5an in the light of those conditions. From this stand-
point modern jurists might well claim not only to be following the
example of their predecessors but also to be improving upon it.21

One of the most momentous challenges to the moral resourcefulness
of Islam in our time has to do with the place of the individual within the
historical process and the rights of the individual within society. It is a
challenge not unlike that which confronted Muhammad himself in a
time marked by a weakening of tribal bonds, increasing social and
economic individualism, and a widening of the gap between rich and
poor. Social justice and the rights of the person in Islam are intimately
linked to the meaning of history as enunciated in the Qw°än. Wilfred
Cantwell Smith suggests three points of contrast between Islam and
Marxism that are illustrative in this connection.22 Islam’s historically
conditioned ethic, unlike that of Marxism, finds still further meaning
beyond history. In light of the Judgment, actions possess both a social-
historical significance and an individual-eternal value. Second, in view

19 Coulson, History of Islamic Law, pp. 223-24.
20 Rahman, Islam, pp. 283-84.
21 Coulson, History of Islamic Law, p. 216.
22 Islam in Modern History, pp. 23-26.

176 THE MUSLIM WORLD

of its eschatology, Islam’s ethic is based on an “objective valuation.”
Marxism denies transcendence and so lacks external, objective norms.
Third, Islam holds, with Marxism, that there is a ‘right shape’ for socie-
ty in history, and therefore owns its responsibility for fostering genuine
social justice. Unlike Marxism, however, Islarii teaches that the final
shape of earthly history is less important than the quality of the in-
dividual’s life. Islam must therefore be committed to the promotion of
human rights.

More than one Muslim writer on the subject of social justice and
human rights has intimated that Islam was the very first major religious
tradition to support those values. Such arguments are highly apologetic
and tend to obscure the central issues by overstating the case for Islam’s
moral leadership.23 Whether or not the QurDän provided a charter of
human rights long before that of the United Nations, and whether or
not Islam originated the concept of communal responsibility, the impor-
tant fact is that Islam’s task now is to continue to affirm those perennial
values. In the epilogue to his The Venture of Islam, Marshall Hodgson
has written of “The Islamic Heritage and the Modern Conscience.” He
describes two major problems of the technological age, namely, the
disruption of cultural traditions and pressure on natural resources.
After discussing the need for social planning and for a lettered mass
culture which has developed from those problems, Hodgson sums up
the underlying ethical dilemma:

We confront a radical unsettling of moral allegiances, and the
need to find adequate human vision to give people a new sense of
what life can mean to them. Even at best, in the West, the old heri-
tages seem to offer less and less of the sort of vision now required; a
non-Western heritage such as the Islamicate may seem not merely
irrelevant but drastically at odds with all the possibility of creative
moral growth.24

23 For example, M.S.H. Mascumi, “Islamic Concept of Human Rights,” in Islamic
Studies, XI (1972), 211-21; R. Sandler, “The Changing Concept of the Individual,” in
Islamic Civilization, ed. Savory, pp. 137-45; Ahmad Hasan, “Social Justice in Islam,”
Islamic Studies, X (1971), 209-19; Sayed Kotb, Social Justice in Islam (New York: Oc-
tagon Books, 1975); Sheikh Mahmoud Ahmad, Social Justice in Islam (Lahore: Institute
of Islamic Culture, 1975); Sir Muhammad Iqbal, Islam as Political and Ethical Ideal
(Lahore, n.d.). Further, on related topics, cf. Ziauddin Ahmed, “Socio-Economie Values
of Islam and Their Significance and Relevance to the Present Day World,” Islamic
Studies, X (1971), 343-55; Galal A. Amin, The Modernization of Poverty (Leiden: E. J.
Brill, 1974).

24 Marshall Hodgson, The Venture of Islam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1974), III, 418.

MUSLIM ETHICS 177

Whatever may need to be modified in actual practice, the’core ethical
principles of the Qur’anic tradition are of proven durability. The
Quran’s summons, to observe and participate in the continual renewal
of all creation, is clear. ”Perhaps** it will be heard.

St. Louis University JOHN RENARD, S. J.
St. Louis, Missouri

^ s

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