Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

172 t CHAPTER SEVEN
your head (or Scripture) tells you one thing and your heart (or someother
part of your anatomy) tells you quite another. What the Hellenic
ethical tradition did do was explain to the Scripturalists, who
were very good at keeping score, the rules of the game. But first the
monotheists had to explain to themselves why there was a game to
begin with.
General Muslim fiqh had as its subject the “roots of the law,”
whereas particular jurisprudence, the “science of the branches,”
was devoted to placing a moral template atop the range of conscious
human activity to provide guidance for the Muslim. Accordingly,
at one end of the spectrum of human acts are those, like
prayer, that are judged “mandatory” or “obliged” (fard) and so
are morally incumbent on the believer. At the other end are practices
that simply forbidden, like usury (Quran 3:130). Between the
absolutely required and the absolutely forbidden stand three intermediary
moral categories. In the middle is the morally neutral
(mubah) act, which lies entirely in the discretion of the agent. Toward
the side of virtue lies a field of acts that are “recommended”
(mandub) and, verging toward vice, the “cautioned” or “discouraged”
(makruh) acts. In all cases, however, it is the internal state,
the agent’s intention (niyya), that is crucial in determining the morality
of a given action.
The lawyers divided prescribed actions into those directed toward
God as his due, the “worshipful acts” (ibadat) that constituted
Islam’s ritual code, and the “deeds” (muamalat) that described
and evaluated transactions between individual Muslims, where the
notion of consensus played a powerful role. The ritual acts that
constitute one category of the Muslim’s obligations are based on
God’s rights and humans’ consequent obligations. The deeds,
however, are acquired obligations. They had their pre-Islamic origins
in transactions, chiefly having to do with land use, and they
never quite lost that original sense even as they broadened into a
moral category. For Ghazali, for example, the muamalat, which
form the heart of Muslim ethics, are constituted either of exchanges
like trading, selling, lending, debt, and the like, or of con-