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understand this obligation and act accordingly. The cultic obligations of
the mentally ill are also determined by the cosmic causes, except that the
mentally ill will not have to execute their obligations until after they
recover their mental capacity. The second position, held by the
Transoxanians, and more specifically the Samarqandīs school, holds that
a legal obligation makes sense only if its performance can be required
and that, therefore, it should not be imposed on someone who does not
have the capacity to perform it. According to strict legal methodology,
the mentally ill cannot, therefore, be obliged to fulfill duties that were
imposed on them while they were unable to understand and to fulfill
them. But equity allows imposing such an obligation upon them, because,
through the performance of the cultic act, the mentally ill can aspire to
God’s recompense for their fasting. To assure them this reward is an
equitable solution. The retroactive performance of the cultic duty is thus
a favor done to the mentally ill. A third opinion, that of the eleventhcentury
Transoxanian jurist Sarakhsī, affirms that cosmic causes produce
cultic obligations because God "glorifies (specific) times and spaces"
through them. But these causes have no meaning for human beings
unless the persons concerned are able to relate the effect of the causes in
an appropriate way to their own choices. The believers must be able to
understand, to refuse or to honor their obligations. Once this condition is
fulfilled, the mentally ill, once they recover their mental capacity, may be
requested to perform the cultic obligation retroactively for all the days
that they missed during a month of RamaÃān. 90
All Sunnī schools of law were thus acutely aware of the tension that may
exist, for the irrational actor, between the notion of the determining force
of the cosmic causes and the concept of a legal obligation as developed
for the relations between human beings in society. Two of them decided
to assimilate the cultic obligation to other civil obligations: they did not
admit the notion that cosmic causes can produce personal obligations of
the mentally ill. Instead, they gave priority to the criterion of mental
capacity over the concept of cosmic causes. The Íanafīs tried to strike an
equilibrium between the notion of legal capacity and that of the cosmic
causes. Only the MÁlikÐs clung uncompromisingly to the doctrine that the