Baber Johansen

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law books do not have the same detailed information on the shahÁda that
they provide on ritual purity, prayer, fasting, alms-tax and pilgrimage
seems to be due to the fact that a chapter-long discussion of this
testimony would, by necessity, oblige the jurists to discuss the proofs for
God’s existence and of the role of prophets for belief in Islam. In short, it
would involve them in the discussion of theological topics with no direct
bearing on the legal consequences of human acts. It seems to me that
they wanted to avoid this discussion by excluding the theologians from
their consensus. Many jurists consider the belief in God and his Prophet
to be the fundamental cultic act because, without it, no performance of
the other parts of the cult would be valid. Again, belief—with one single
exception—is not the object of a particular chapter in the Sunni law
books and it is, as far as I can see, not subject to the kind of legal or ritual
norms that regulate all other forms of the ritual. The law concentrates its
attention on the human acts and utterances that can be observed and
regulated. It discusses the religious meaning, the correct execution and
the religious reward of cultic acts, but rarely their theological premises.
In fact, it seems that GhazÁlÐ, in his analysis of the relation between
theology and law that he puts forward at the very beginning of his
MustaÒfÁ, gives a systematic explanation of the way this question is
organized in the books of fiqh.
VI.3: The causality of the ritual act: divine commands and cosmic
causes
Even the discussion of the practical aspects of ritual shows that the jurists
face problems when they try to integrate the cosmic aspects of religion—
as developed in theology—into forms of legal reasoning that are based on
the free choice of the responsible actor (ikhtiyÁr). That the cult is closely
linked to cosmic causes is evident to the jurists: the obligatory prayers
have to be performed at certain times of the day, the obligatory fasting
has to be performed during the days of the month of RamaÃÁn, and
pilgrimage can only be performed in the sacred month and in the sacred
precinct of Mecca. Many jurists, therefore, latest from the eleventh