Baber Johansen

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God. The actor’s contingent decisions based on free choice, intent and
purpose form the object of the legal norms. The classifications of time
and space into sacred and profane and the systems of classification that
range cultic acts into hierarchies according to the degree of their
obligatory character enable the jurists to construe the regulation of the
cult as a legal system. Under all these aspects, the legal concept of the
cultic act shows striking similarities with the concept of the legal act as
used in other fields of the law. But there are even more striking
dissimilarities: the most important of them being the fact that cultic acts
constitute relations between the believers and God and that they are not
subject to the judiciary’s control. The political and judicial authorities
only enter the field of the cult if individuals deny the existence or the
validity of cultic obligations or refuse to practice them over long periods.
The fact that non-Muslims cannot perform a valid cultic act is even more
important. It shows that non-Muslims are not integrated into this field of
the law. They are excluded from it. It is a field of law that is reserved for
Muslim
VIII. The World of Human Transactions
The cult regulates the believer’s obligations towards God. By contrast,
the obligations between individual persons—or between individual
persons and the political and judicial authorities—are regulated through
the norms governing the field of "legal transactions" (muÝÁmalÁt). In this
field, the legal subject does not have to be a Muslim, but a free person, in
possession of her mental capacity. The rules that regulate this field apply
to the political, not the religious, community of Islam. Contrary to the
information provided by many manuals on Muslim law, these rules
address non-Muslim subjects of Muslim rulers whether they belong to
polytheistic or monotheistic religions. According to the Mālikī and the
Íanafī schools of Sunnī law, "polytheists and fire worshippers" are
admitted as subjects to the Muslim political authorities. The fiqh rules of
legal transactions, therefore, apply to them. It is only from the ninth
century on that the ShāfiÝīs and the Íanbalīs restrict the membership in