Fellow @YaleLawSch PhD from @Princeton. Islamic law, ethics, theo, phil.
Sep 28, 2023 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
An Islamic take on the wrong of slavery, from Abu Abd Allah al-Bukhari, the teacher of the famed Marghinani:
Slavery is legal and actual weakness because, through domination and ownership, "a human being is made into a thing...like animals subjugated for the benefit of humans."
Long block quote:
"The disbeliever is made into a thing if he does not use his intellect to reason from the abundance of evidence. So a legal weakness is imposed upon him. He is punished with this weakness because he did not use his faculty of intelligence to reason...
Nov 6, 2022 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
Troubling quote from Sarakhsi: "If a woman were told to earn [her living], she would earn it with her genitals."
context: husbands must provide bc women are incapable of earning
Katz quotes correctly, but something bothered me about this. How can Sarakhsi say such a thing ...
...when women worked all the time?
He probably got it from a report attributed to Uthman b. Affan in the Muwatta': "do not burden an unskilled slave girl with earning money, if you do she will do so with her genitals..."
Nov 6, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Central to Katz's book is a critique of Asad and Hallaqs' view that the distinction between law and morality is a modern one.
Katz reading of Islamic legal texts leads her to conclude that law/ethics were "autonomous yet overlapping" discourses, entwined but distinct.
She continuously reasserts the difference between "legal" and "ethical" norms.
She offers important corrections, but Asad and Hallaq are still right. Katz, like Johansen, imposes her own analytical framework by distinguishing btw law/ethics
Dec 5, 2021 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
From my upcoming talk "Maqāṣid al-sharīʿa as Virtue Jurisprudence"
Beginning w/ a genealogical critique of the mainstream theory of maqāṣid (developed by Ghazali). How did maqāṣid move from the periphery to the center, from narrow technical method to grand philosophy of law?
Ghazali introduces maqāṣid in chapter on qiyās, a source/method of lawmaking that is tightly procedural. In short, qiyas creates rules building on a concrete precedent. But what happens when there's no such precedent? Enter maqāṣid al-sharīʿa.
