Anver M Emon, ISLAMIC NATURAL LAW THEORIES Oxford: Oxford University Press (www.oup.com), 2010. x + 222 pp. ISBN 9780199579006. £55.
| Date | 01 September 2013 |
| Author | Stephen C Neff |
| Published date | 01 September 2013 |
| DOI | 10.3366/elr.2013.0180 |
| Pages | 442-444 |
It is commonly said that a striking difference between the Western and Islamic philosophical and jurisprudential traditions is the absence of natural-law thought in the Islamic world. This book contests that traditional view – and supports its case with detailed expositions of the key Muslim writings in the natural-law tradition. After this book, pronouncements on the subject will never be the same again.
The author's definition of natural law may be stated simply. It is the thesis that the study of the natural world can yield important truths in the realm of morals and values, outside of any explicit religious framework. Divinity is not altogether absent from this picture, for it is conceded that, as the original creator of the world, God must be in some sense ultimately responsible for nature and its laws. But the generic natural-law thesis holds that God created the world in such a way as to make it possible for humans to apply their powers of reason to the study of that world and directly to discover important moral, ethical and even religious truths from it.
This basic natural-law belief contrasts with voluntaristic philosophies and theologies, which stress the free, arbitrary will of God as the source of all values – with that will being discoverable exclusively through revelation rather than through study of the natural world. This is the predominant philosophy – or at least theology – of the Islamic world, in the form of the 'Asharite theology, which is strongly voluntaristic and providentialist, ascribing each and every occurrence, however minute, to the conscious will of God. The natural-law outlook also contrasts with the secular philosophies of the positivist stripe, which maintain that there is no connection between the physical world and the realm of human values.
The author of this book not only insists, in great detail, on the existence of natural-law thought in the Muslim world. He goes on to characterise it as coming in two principal versions, which he calls “hard” and “soft” natural law. These two approaches were in agreement as to the existence of a close bond between the physical and moral worlds. But they differed as to the nature and origin of that link. The hard natural lawyers held, broadly, that the affinity between the two realms is an inherent and inevitable feature of our universe. God could not have created the universe in any other fashion because a world in which nature and morals were
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