Baber Johansen

26
The rational reconstruction of the contingent world’s creation by an
eternal and not contingent divinity is the task of theology. But once it has
performed this task and has proven the existence of the divine, the
creation of the world by the divinity, the truthfulness of God’s prophets
and—consequently—the truthfulness of revelation, its competency and
authority ends. God’s word and God’s will are only partly accessible to
human rationality. With regard to them, rational investigation cannot
reach conclusive results. When the Prophet and the texts of the revelation
request that human beings obey the divine law in the contingent world so
as to ensure their happiness in the non-contingent world of the hereafter,
the theologians do not find the instruments by which to prove or to
disprove this claim in their tool kit. They, therefore, have to submit to the
authority of the revealed text, whose authenticity they can prove but for
whose interpretation and analysis their methods of the rational
reconstruction of the existing world are not appropriate. "The sacred law
here brings what reason by itself cannot comprehend." The theologians—
like all other believers—have to submit to this authority.
The authority to interpret the QurÞÁn, to authenticate the ÎadÐth, to
recognize and develop the norms of the applied law (furÙÝ al-fiqh) or the
rules of the methodology of law (uÒÙl al-fiqh) falls not to theology, the
discipline of the universal, but to the disciplines of the particulars.
Exegesis, ÎadÐth, applied law (furÙÝ al-fiqh), and legal methodology (uÒÙl
al-fiqh) are each more competent in their own fields than theology. These
disciplines depend for the proof of the relation between the contingent
world and its non-contingent creator on the results of the theologian’s
work. But their scholars are not obliged to be theologians, because their
disciplines constitute particular fields of knowledge that cannot be
governed by the universal discipline of theology. 80
In a similar approach the Íanbalī jurist Ibn ÝAqÐl, the leading scholar of
his school at the end of the eleventh and the beginning of the twelfth
century, distinguishes the theologian from the jurist in the following
words: