This paper presents three theoretical accounts developed to assess the moral value and legal status of acts designed to promote commercial gain in the thought of major classical Muslim scholars. There has been an increased interest in Islamic commercial law and ethics in recent years. Much of the recent scholarship consists of practically inclined studies that tend to lump the Islamic tradition of evaluation of commerce under the principles of social justice and avoidance of harm. Our study of three selected scholars will reveal distinct approaches that are characteristic of classical Islamic ethical discussions: anchoring moral value in this world, attributing moral goodness to salvation in the next world, and finding a balance between these two approaches. Counterintuitively, we will see that the naturalistic view that ascribes moral values to things and actions was the most restrictive, whereas the dualistic model that focuses on salvation in the next world was markedly more permissive of commercial transactions.
This essay examines the ways in which pre-modern Muslim jurists adapted their legal methods to accommodate the complexity of the act of listening to music. I classify those methods from the least to the most inclusive of underlying notions of moral value. This study shows that models on opposite ends of the spectrum function in similar ways. Whether, as in Ibn Ḥazm’s work, the scope of legal norms is confined to the immediate textual meaning, or, as in Ibn Taymiyya’s thought, the formulation of norms corresponds to an underlying moral aim, the result is a broad treatment of all phenomena that relate to music (samāʿ). By contrast, Ghazālī’s discussion of samāʿ is guided by the need to attain conviction of the appropriate course of action rather than the pursuit of an objective truth about the legal-moral status of the act of listening to music, resulting in a subtle case-by-case evaluation, rather than an overarching judgment. While this study does not attempt to give a comprehensive historical account of how and why scholars of Islamic law attempted to restrict or permit certain musical experiences, we can ultimately see how the sharīʿa, a legal system that is fundamentally concerned with moral behavior, purported to advance reasonable models for the assessment and regulation of complex social phenomena.
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