In this book, Omar Farahat presents a new way of understanding the work of classical Islamic theologians and legal theorists who maintained that divine revelation is necessary for the knowledge of the norms and values of human actions. Through a reconstruction of classical Ashʿarī-Muʿtazilī debates on the nature and implications of divine speech, Farahat argues that the Ashʿarī attachment to revelation was not a purely traditionalist position. Rather, it was a rational philosophical commitment emerging from debates in epistemology and theology. (...) He further argues that the particularity of this model makes its distinctive features helpful for contemporary scholars who defend a form of divine command theory. Farahat's volume thus constitutes a new reading of the issue of reason and revelation in Islam and breaks new ground in Islamic theology, law and ethics. (shrink)

Theories of ethics that attempt to incorporate divine speech or commands as necessary elements in the construction of moral obligations are often viewed as vulnerable to a challenge based on the so-called Euthyphro dilemma. According to this challenge, opponents of theistic ethics suppose that divine speech either informs one of a preexisting set of values and obligations, which makes it inconsequential, or is entirely arbitrary, which makes it irrational. This essay analyzes some of the debates on the nature of divine (...) commands in eleventh-century works of Islamic jurisprudence. I show that Muʿtazilī jurisprudents advanced the view that divine commands were actions performed in time that had concrete manifestations, while Ashʿarīs argued that divine speech in general, and commands in particular, were eternal divine attributes. After exposing certain weaknesses in the Euthyphro-inspired objections to theistic ethics, I argue that the Ashʿarī idea of commands as divine attributes is a promising move for scholars interested in defending a divine command view of moral obligation. (shrink)

Even though the Islamic legal tradition advanced its own set of conceptions of time, modern scholarship on Islamic law has not paid much attention to these conceptions. This paper argues that Islamic jurisprudents understood time in moral terms, not as a neutral container or mere background for action, but as a series of opportunities in which the authority of divine revelation and human moral reasoning are articulated. I suggest that the debates over the manners of compliance with divine commands in (...) time were attempts at reaching some form of balance between the considerations of faithfulness to the demands of divine revelation and the practical imperatives of human temporal lives. This argument is advanced through a study of classical debates among jurists within the two major Sunnī schools of jurisprudence on the specific question of whether divine commands that are devoid of time indications should result in immediate or delayed performance. (shrink)