“God Cannot be Harmed”: On Ḥuqūq Allāh/Ḥuqūq al-‘Ibād

Continuum
Wael Hallaq
Columbia University

I
The Shar‘ī concept of ḥaqq1 navigates the cosmological-sociological
spectrum robustly, from one end to the other. Ḥaqq is not only the Truth of
the divine as ontology, but also the theological and supra-deontological
source of that which is socially just (‘adl), right (mustaqīm), and equitable
(qisṭ). Ḥaqq is God as one and many, this being a “dualistic” presence of His
saturating the world in its unity, plurality and particularity. That which is
right and equitable is derivative of the Truth, for the Truth, tautologically,
encompasses all that is right and equitable.
Like all else in the phenomenological world -- the world that we in
part explain nowadays through phenomenology and the sociology of

1
In classical Arabic, ḥaqq is the singular form of ḥuqūq, but it is also an abstract noun
signifying the idea, phenomenon or concept as an intangible entity. The plural form,
however, was nearly always grounded in particular and concrete rights. In modern
Arabic, the plural form has come to mean the abstract notion of “rights,” and when
combined with kulliyyah (college), it referred to the modern “law school,” where
students learn about “rights” as well as laws that give rise to rights. Although
terminological designation is not always significant or instructive, it is significant that
the move from the pre-modern “madrasah” to the “kulliyyat al-ḥuqūq” signaled a shift in
understanding the concept of “law” as a coercive state system: whereas ‘ilm and dars
(learning and study) embodied the technologies of the self that engendered a particular
form of hermeneutics – that is, where moral techniques of the self and ethical
hermeneutical apparatus came together as a union – the “kulliyyat al-ḥuqūq” mainly
connotes the technical study of the law as a system of rights. This shift is paradigmatic, in
the sense of deep change within the structural central domains of culture and social
constitution. On paradigms and central domains, see Wael Hallaq, The Impossible State:
Islam, Politics, and Modernity’s Moral Predicament (New York: Columbia University Press,
2013): 6-13.
knowledge – the very idea of ḥaqq is itself a derivative of the real and not
always fully comprehensible concept as presumably appearing in the
divine vulgate, a concept whose contents and boundaries remain subject to
an indefinite and unceasing interpretive and intellectual quest of the
human mind. The derivative is also no more than an approximate copy of
the original, for the very challenge of the divine to the human kind –
whose originary dilemma was the very concept of rational “autonomy”
represented in the Edenic Fall – is precisely the endless exercise of the
mind to uncover the moral and ethical in worldly and social phenomena.
As a derivative, then, ḥaqq acquires different meanings within the
various and varied intellectual and commentarial-textual traditions that
made up much of the discursive formations of Islam for the twelve
centuries prior to colonial conquest. In Sufism, for instance, al-Ḥaqq
acquired socio-cosmological meanings of spirituality and piety that raised
the bar of ethical engagement in the world through care of the self and
individualistic self-definitions and redefinitions of behavior. But the bar
was admittedly not for everyone to reach, having an exclusivity that is
eloquently attested by the survival to the end of the sojourn of a select but
small group of birds in ‘Aṭṭār’s powerful Manṭiq al-Ṭayr.2
If the higher forms of Sufism were not for everyone, the Sharī‘ah
was designed and specifically intended precisely to engender internal
discipline and to regulate human behavior in psychological ways across
the entire social spectrum, leaving no type of person or recognizable space
unregulated, be it a woman or a man, a minor or a major, the mentally firm
or infirm, a proprietor or dispossessed, a free person or a slave, and so on.

2
Farīd al-Dīn al-‘Aṭṭār, The Conference of the Birds, trans. Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis
(New York: Penguin, 1984).

2
But it also integrated into its own concepts of justice an array of disciplines
and ideas, ranging from moderated forms of mysticism, to logic, theology,
adab and poetry.3
Due to its structural centrality, ḥaqq had therefore to be defined
simultaneously as a theological, moral, and legal concept, having navigated
the waters that have flown and continue to flow from the divine to the
humanly subordinate and even earthly banal. If the world is made by one
mind, then it must be interconnected, and if all its parts relate to each
other -- which they do -- then every part is as important as the next, and
all, small and great, are seen to exist in symbiosis. The meanings and
imperatives that attach to the concept must thus vary from one stage of
the flow to the next. They must accommodate each resting place on the
sojourn downward. The purest and most perfect form – that which we
may characterize as the ideal or highest desideratum – lies at the source of
the flow, where al-Lawḥ al-Maḥfūẓ is kept.4 But the proverbial water must
flow further down, treading the physical world of humans and their social
habitats, languages, customs and forms of knowledge, all of which being
explicitly admitted by the entire range of Muslim intellectuals who
discoursed on it as varied in the extreme.

3
Cf. Shahab Ahmed’s What is Islam? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), in
which he misinterprets my writings on the subject and attributes to me – as well as to
others – an excessively narrow understanding of Sharī‘a’s range and cultural
embeddedness. On my theoretical and substantive reservations with regard to the
terminology of “law” and “legal,” see my W. Hallaq, Sharī‘a: Theory, Practice,
Transformations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 1-6, a work which
Ahmed lists in his bibliography but which he does not seem to have read. On the
paradigmatic stature of the Sharī‘ah in terms of its engagements with various other
central and peripheral domains, including mysticism, adab and much else, see my
Impossible State, 6-15, and ch. 5.
4
Q. 85:22.

3
 The Sharī‘ah’s domain, specialized yet extensive, begins at the point
at which the divine Word reaches the realm of human understanding, the
Word itself being stratified and diffused in its Manifestation (tajallī)
throughout the Signs (āyāt) of Creation (khalq) as well as those of the
Qur’ānic sentential structure. Language, like any physical and intangible
creation, is itself a divine āya that not only expresses thought but is also
itself endowed with performative power (“And We said to it ‘Be,’ and so it
became”).5 Thus the performativity that engenders the regulative mode
(those moral codes and rules governing human behavior) is nothing more
than the tail end of the mode in which the world itself was created. In this
account, there is neither a Hobbesian moment nor secondary causes where
God created a self-regulating world and left it to humans to run as they
like, without boundaries that are conceived to always control and
adjudicate human behavior (legal or otherwise) by the highest standards of
ethics.
This “downward” trajectory of ḥaqq meant the non-separation of the
low from high principles from which the concept emanated. In this
trajectory, God is ever-present and most explicitly involved in regulating
the social order. As we will see, the communal and collective, as much as
the individual and particular, appear always as the locus of God’s heavy
involvement, without positioning any of these in opposition or conflict
with the others. The lower the flow of the moral code and its regulative
domain, the more autonomy is granted to the individual.6 Yet, however
thick this autonomy may be, it remains metaphorical at best, for just as

5
Q. 2:177; 6:73; 16:40. See also W. Hallaq, “Moral Cosmology and the Structure of Life,”
in Re-Citing the Qur’ān to Modernity (in progress).
6
On qualifications pertaining to the concept of “individual,” see section II, below.

4
humans cannot really own any material objects in the world, they cannot
possess rights that are not derivative. Ownership of tangible matter and
rights is never absolute, an intended tenuousness that did a performative
work of immense importance, in terms of redistribution of wealth and
much else.
If ḥaqq is the consequence and effect of divine volition, then it is also
a divine providence and bounty, seen to derive its moral thrust and
juridical rules from revelatory textuality as adapted to human
circumstance and surround. Although this textuality merely intimates and
gestures (īmā’) at God’s will, leaving the moral-juridical challenge of living
life as an ultimately human determination and decision (li-yablwakum
ayyukum aḥsanu ‘amalan7), the originary ḥuqūq, even in their indeterminate
and inextricably abstract forms, are Allah’s and Allah’s alone. For Muslim
jurists, theologians and other intellectuals, this affiliation with the divine
amounted not only to a construction of the world that escaped the
trappings of skeptical nihilism (which they encountered at every turn), but
also ensured a morally derived legal culture that gave the concept of the
rule of law a robust and particularly thick meaning.
Yet, the strength and seriousness of the derivatives depend on the
staying power and potency of that of which they are derivatives. Just as
there is no single ḥaqq devoid of God’s presence, there cannot be any ḥaqq
without a suffusive layer in it of human interest and welfare, even though
it may appear to be a purely ordained ḥaqq of God. As Shāṭibī pointedly
sums up the matter, “every shar‘ī value (ḥukm) must ineluctably contain a
ḥaqq of an individual believer (lil-‘ibād) that is geared toward serving (an

7
Q. 18:7; 67:1-2; 11:17.

5
interest) either in this World or the Next, this (being based on the
principle that) the Sharī‘ah was created for the purpose of serving the
interest of Muslims.”8

II
Ḥaqq encompasses a range of meanings that are intimately connected to
judicial decision, owned property (māl mamlūk), the property itself, the
very attribute of ownership, entitlement,9 and all in rem and in personam
claims. It signifies a legal stipulation that determines a right -- over
something or someone -- or an obligation, thus covering the entire range
of so-called religious obligations, civil rights, social codes of proper
conduct, and the rights and obligations ruler and subjects possess within
the body politic. This definition must always account for an essential
connection between a right and a person to whom the right will ultimately
be connected. The existence of an actual ḥaqq (as opposed to a nominal
one) without a person or entity associated with it thus becomes a
conceptual and ontological impossibility, since a right must by definition
presuppose a connection to, or implication of, a conception of person,
subject or entity.10
The ontological-cosmological span of ḥaqq’s range allowed the jurists
to create a tripartite typology in which the ḥuqūq are classified as God’s
rights (ḥuqūq Allāh), believers’ rights (ḥuqūq al-‘ibād), and a mixture that
straddles the two. The latter was further sub-divided, in a graded manner,
8
Abū Isḥāq al-Shāṭibī, al-Muwāfaqāt fī Uṣūl al-Aḥkām, ed. Muḥammad Muḥyī al-Dīn ‘Abd
al-Ḥamīd, 4 vols. (Cairo: Maktabat M. ‘Alī Ṣubayḥ, 1970), II, 233.
9
As in Q. 70: 24-25.
10
“Subject” or “entity” are intended to enlarge the scope of definition beyond the
natural person so that institutions like waqf (which are no less embedded in a matrix of
ḥuqūq) are also taken into account.

6
into those ḥuqūq that belong more (ghālib) to God and those belonging more
to the ‘ibād.
Before proceeding, the term individual requires some clarification
since any explication of ḥuqūq al-‘ibād seem to invoke the individual and
his or her “rights.”11 “Individual rights” or “rights of the individual” must
henceforth be taken to refer not to the modern meaning of “individual”
but rather to the “believing individual” and/or “believing individuals,” the
subject and object of taklīf. In this designation, “belief” is emphatically a
necessary condition, since ḥuqūq arise because of the ontological
presupposition of belief. The distinction is thus not between an individual
as opposed to a group, a collective, or society at large, but rather between
believers and God; or between considerations pertaining to the individual
as the locus of personal rights and some areas of particularly grave
communal concern and foundations of worship. It is, in other words,
modulating the individual in communal space, as it is no less modulating
the communal in the larger environment of creation. It would nonetheless
be incorrect in this context to arrogate a supra-human status to God in
terms of the ḥuqūq of non-‘ibād, for much of ḥuqūq Allāh are in fact ḥuqūq
that relate to, and are often exclusively associated with, society at large,
even when these take abstract or metaphysical forms.
The point here is that the subject of distinction is not between the
social collective and the private individual, or the private and the public --
binaries that are distinctly modern. Rather, the distinction is between

11
Of course a proper, nuanced and full explanation of ḥuqūq al-‘ibād (as well as ḥuqūq
Allāh) requires a near comprehensive account of the fiqh, discussing each of these ḥuqūq
in its theoretical, substantive and juridical contexts. But then this begs the question, for
if such an account of fiqh is assumed, then the need for an explanation of the ḥuqūq
would become superfluous.

7
spheres in which there arises great concern with matters related to
communal welfare and its moral fabric, on the one hand, and those related
to private interests and the sacredness of individual rights within communal
contexts, on the other. To speak of the distinction as one that pits the
individual against the group would thus be misleading, since, as we will
see, many ḥuqūq Allāh pertained to individual rights while a number of
ḥuqūq al-‘ibād pertained to collective or group interests. To anticipate my
concluding argument in part, the distinction was intended to assert
continuities on the spectrum of these ḥuqūq while at the same time
attempting to find an explanation for the right balance between and
among the various relevant considerations in the resolution of each matter
falling on any given point of the spectrum. As much as the discourse of
ḥuqūq Allāh/ḥuqūq al-‘ibād was heuristic in purpose (and it was), it had too
many exceptions, overlapping, and gray areas to make it constitutive of
originary -- and thus reflective of the actual -- conditions that gave rise to
legal doctrine and constructive reasoning.

III
It was a pervasive and consensus-like understanding among jurists and
theologians alike that God’s rights are generally, though not exclusively,
intended to regulate the sphere of “public” interest where things in the
world belong to no one person or group in particular. They are attributed
to God, one jurists declared, because of the crucial importance of this
sphere, let alone the profound concern that a coercive or oppressive
(political) power (aḥad min al-jabābirah) might attempt to control it as his

8
own, and to do with it as he likes.12 This seems to be a manifestation of
providence rather than defining powers of control or rule. Clearly, the
designation of God here is nominal, for it was understood by everyone that
God the Self-Sufficient does not need to be given such honors or privileges,
because, having created them himself, he owned them ab intio and without
qualification. Nor can he be harmed by conceding these rights, but fragile
humans on the other hand can, and easily so.13
The jurists generally identify two distinctly different areas of the law
that they deem to fall under God’s ḥuqūq. The first and readily identifiable
area is that of the conventionally categorized ‘ibādāt, the so-called “rituals”
involving prayer, fasting, pilgrimage, alms-tax and a host of related
branches of the law such as encouraging right and averting evil,
commission of oaths, and generally acts related to niyyah, where deliberate
intent is an essential pre-condition for right practice.14 The other area is
what may be called in pre-modern Sharī‘ah the “public” sphere of criminal
offenses,15 including ḥudūd, discretionary punishments (ta‘zīr), order on

12
‘Alā’ al-Dīn al-Bukhārī as cited in al-Mawsū‘a al-Fiqhiyyah, 45 vols. (Kuwait: Wizārat al-
Awqāf wal-Shu’ūn al-Islāmiyyah, 1993-2006), XVIII, 8.
13
‘Alī b. Muḥammad Sayf al-Dīn Āmidī, al-Iḥkām fī Uṣūl al-Aḥkām, ed. ‘Abd al-Razzāq
‘Afīfī, 4 vols. (Riyad: Dār Ṣumay‘ī, 2003), II, 332; Abū ‘Abd Allāh Badr al-Dīn al-Zarkashī,
al-Manthūr fī al-Qawā‘id, ed. Muḥammad Ismā‘īl, 2 vols. (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-
‘Ilmiyyah, 1421/2000), I, 299-300.
14
See Hallaq, Sharī‘a, 229-30; Shāṭibī, Muwāfaqāt, II, 333. Shāṭibī expands the scope of
niyya beyond the conventional delimitation, thereby including virtually the entire
sphere of mu‘āmalāt. From sales to giving loans and from marriage to divorce and
pecuniary familial support, niyya is to be present (giving a loan thus can be a merely
self-interested transaction of profit, but when intention is present it would be
motivated by a genuine feeling of extending support to a fellow Muslim (kamā idhā
aqraḍa imtithālan lil-amri bil-tawsi‘ah ‘alā al-Muslim).
15
For qualifications with regard to the use of such terminology, see Hallaq, Sharī‘a, 308-
09.

9
highways, public roads, ports, and public edifices, such as mosques, some
waqfs, markets, bridges, etc.
There is, however, yet another area that straddles these different
domains, namely, kaffārāt. “Mixing penalty and worship,”16 these are
forms of expiation for a variety of infractions ranging from having sexual
intercourse during Ramaḍān fasting to breaking an oath.17
These ḥuqūq are generally said not to be subject to negotiation or
reduction in their requirements of validity, procedure, or implementation.
Nor are they subject to clemency, amicable settlement, or concession of
any sort.18 For instance, while “individual’s rights,” such as debts, can be
forgiven, God’s rights are not subject, without legal cause,19 to human
bargaining of any sort, be they ḥudūd crimes or infractions as innocuous as
a seemingly simple prayer. Whatever ḥaqq the ‘abd can lawfully relinquish
is not one that can be claimed by God.20 Thus, punishment of sariqa-theft21
or adultery, once established by a court of law, cannot be disposed of by
the forgiveness of the theft victim or of the spouse of the adulterer,
respectively. Nor, still, can God’s rights devolve upon the heirs, for these
rights expire upon the expiry of the concerned charge, whether his or her
faults relate to acts of worship or criminality.

16
Zarkashī, Manthūr, I, 299.
17
Ibid, I, 299, 203-04.
18
Although withdrawal of zinā confession, for instance, has the power to annul the ḥadd
punishment. See n. 23, below.
19
Some jurists permitted forgiveness by way of repentance in certain offenses. See
Zarkashī, Manthūr, I, 300.
20
Aḥmad b. Idrīs al-Qarāfī, al-Furūq aw Anwār al-Burūq fī Anwā’ al-Furūq, ed. Khalīl
Manṣūr, 4 vols. (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-‘Ilmiyyah, 1998), I, 256.
21
Sariqa-theft is a ḥadd, to be distinguished from a theft that does not meet the
procedural requirements of ḥadd, an offense categorized as, and punished by, ta‘zīr.

10
 Nonetheless, the uncompromising appearance of ḥuqūq Allāh is
somewhat deceptive, for in certain matters of the law, ḥuqūq al-‘ibād do
take precedence over their counterparts on grounds of the law’s obligation
to be lenient or forgiving.22 Withdrawal (rujū‘) of zinā confession, for
instance, has the power to annul the ḥadd punishment;23 and so does
repentance for the commission of highway robbery.24 Al-‘Izz Ibn ‘Abd al-
Salām enumerates several cases in which ḥaqq al-‘abd supersedes that of
God, but one particular example demonstrates the intimacy and mutuality
of the relationship between the two categories. As is well known, jihād is a
right of God, leaving the emir as the supreme commander of its campaigns.
In modern military conduct, the general’s order in the battlefield reigns
supreme, the violation of which could lead to the serious charge of
subordination or desertion. As I have shown elsewhere in the context of a
comparison between the modern state and Sharī‘ah with regard to
conscription,25 the Sharī‘ah bestowed substantial autonomy over the
combatants, passing over the commanding general’s orders. According to
shar‘ī regulations of armed engagement, combatants are permitted to

22
‘Izz al-Dīn Ibn ‘Abd al-Salām, al-Qawā‘id al-Kubrā al-Mawsūm bi-Qawā‘id al-Aḥkām fī Iṣlāḥ
al-Anām, eds. Nazīh Ḥammād and ‘Uthmān Ḍamīriyyah, 2 vols (Damascus: Dār al-Qalam,
2000), I, 255 f. The section dedicated to this theme is entitled “Fīmā Yuqaddam min Ḥuqūq
al-‘Ibād ‘alā Ḥaqq al-Rabb Rifqan bihim.” It is also instructive that in another section (I, 252
ff.), where he speaks of ḥuqūq al-Rabb as having priority over ḥuqūq al-‘ibād, Ibn ‘Abd al-
Salām casts the priority as being motivated by “advancing the interests of the ‘ibād in
the Hereafter.” This common doctrinal attitude, needless to say, in effect reflects a
theistic humanism no less interested in the welfare of human beings than secular
humanism is, albeit providing a different rational articulation of the world as well as a
different undersdtanding of what the concept of interest signifies.
23
Zarkashī, Manthūr, I, 299.
24
Muḥammad b. Ibrāhīm al-Baqūrī, Tartīb al-Furūq wa-Ikhtiṣāruhā (Beirut: Dār Ibn Ḥazm,
2005), 397. Here Baqūrī reports Qarāfī’s pondering over why this heinous crime --
alongside that of heresy (another ḥaqq Allāh) -- is trumped by nothing more than
repentance.
25
Hallaq, Impossible State, 92-5.

11
withdraw (inhizām) from the battleground should they themselves –
individually or collectively -- estimate that defeat is inevitable due to being
outnumbered (idhā arbā ‘adad al-kafarah ‘alā a‘dād al-islām).26 In this picture,
the Schmittian decision to invoke the absolute exception collapses in the
face of individual moral and political autonomy that eviscerates
sovereignty’s absolute hold over life and death. Far from being Schmittian,
ḥuqūq Allāh are set aside in favor of ḥuqūq al-‘ibād, precisely in one of the
most crucial moments of the political, the body politic, and of the state’s
architecture of life and death.
This autonomy relates to another feature that can be misleading to a
modernly conditioned mind. Some Ḥanafite jurists held the position that a
victim of a crime that is potentially classifiable within the category of
ḥuqūq Allāh may opt for a private settlement, in effect preempting
governmental interference.27 Only if he or she decides to sue in a court of
law does the court decision become a matter of “state” enforceability.
There were some jurists who held opinions seemingly similar to the
modern state’s model, whereby sultanic authority is granted an
autonomous right to prosecute these categories of offenses through
Sharī‘ah courts. But it was by these courts’ law, not the government’s, that

26
Ibn ‘Abd al-Salām, al-Qawā‘id al-Kubrā, 255. See also Hallaq, Impossible State, 94-5, for
other jurists’ doctrines upholding the same legal norm.
27
Baber Johansen, “Sacred and Religious Element in Hanafite Law – Function and Limits
of the Absolute Character of Government Authority,” in Islam et Politique au Maghreb,
eds. E. Gelner and J.-C. Vatin (Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1981),
298-300. Johansen does not cast the matter as I have, for he departs, as we will see, from
the assumption that a victim of theft would want both his property restituted and the
thief punished by amputation. This assumption is overloaded with the normativity of
the state’s role as the ultimate prosecutor that possesses its own rights to punish and
discipline. In the absence of the apparatus of state and its institutional presence in pre-
modernity, the conditioned belief in such rights may have been either thin or virtually
absent. See further sec. IV, below.

12
these ḥuqūq were adjudged. We need not overstress, furthermore, that the
very possibility of this “individual” autonomy is absent from the modern
state on principle (think, in particular, of homicide or of such examples as
desserting the battlefield).
Ḥuqūq al-‘ibād, on the other hand, pertain to the range of interests
any person must enjoy, beginning with his right to buy and sell, gift,
collect or forgive loans, entitlement to blood-money, damages, and her
right to spousal support, alimony, and the like. As intimated earlier,
contrary to God’s rights, these rights can be forgiven, demanded, declined,
or otherwise. They are also liable to legacy, as in the case of children
inheriting the right of their parent against a debtor (madīn) or
“misappropriator” (=usurper=ghāṣib). Whereas these rights are elaborated
by the jurists with a keen eye to prevent interference by any external
authority or agent, the opposite, as we saw, was not true. Ḥuqūq Allāh seem
to be more malleable, negotiable, and less “absolute” than ḥuqūq al-‘ibād.
No reduction of God’s rights, whatever its extent, can, after all, hurt him in
the least.
But the straddling of many ḥuqūq over the two categories necessarily
entailed a constant search for balance.28 Certain legal spheres may conjoin
God’s and believer’s rights, in which case one type of right may over-
shadow or dominate over the other. Among the ḥudūd, qadhf directly
affects a person’s reputation and standing in the community, but God’s
rights – according to the Ḥanafites29-- take precedence since the offense

28
If not in the creation of rules and legal values, then at least in using these categories
in rationalizing the law ex post factum.
29
‘Abd al-Wahhāb b. Aḥmad b. ‘Alī al-Miṣrī al-Sha‘rānī, al-Mīzān al-Kubrā al-Sha‘rāniyyah
al-Mudkhilah li-Jamī‘ Aqwāl al-A’immah al-Mujtahidīn wa-Muqallidīhim fī al-Sharī‘ah al-

13
has public ramifications, affecting, as it were, the entire realm of social and
communal value. The individual here is a microscopic instance of society
at large, and her or his rights in this respect capture and distill the rights
of all individuals making up the community (or so-called society).
Homicide, on the other hand, represents an otherwise “mixed” area
of the law where the individual’s rights dominate over those of God’s. As
attested in the Qur’ān and ḥadīth, God has a right or at least a regulative
interest in murder, since the heinousness of the crime surely affects the
entire community in which it occurs. It is a “crime against the
community,” if not “against humanity,”30 properly speaking. Yet, the harm
is also very specific, directly and most perniciously affecting the victim
and by extension the victim’s kin who have, furthermore, the statutory
power to determine the type of penalty or even opt for forgiveness.31 There
would probably be no difference between qadhf and homicide in terms of
ḥuqūq classification had it not been for the statutory Qur’ānic verse, one
that lacks parallel in the case of qadhf, a comparatively less heinous crime.
It would seem that customary law in the case of homicide was so
entrenched within tribal structures of the pre-Islamic Near East that a
degree of autonomy was granted the victim’s kin in opting for one of the
three courses of action available to them.32 As an offense, qadhf must have
possessed weaker roots in agnatic or communal structures (especially in
Iraq?), thus allowing Ḥanafite fiqh to take individual agency out of the law.
Social good and public interest thus cannot be always fixed as an ever-

Muḥammadiyyah, ed. ‘Abd al-Wārith Muḥammad ‘Alī, 2 vols. (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-
‘Ilmiyyah, 1418/1998), 222.
30
Q., 5:32; “He who kills a (human) life… has killed all humankind.”
31
Muḥammad b. Aḥmad Ibn Juzayy, al-Qawānīn al-Fiqhiyyah, ed. Muḥammad Ḍannāwī
(Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-‘Ilmiyyah, 2006), 255-58.
32
I.e., retaliation, blood-money, or forgiveness.

14
present consideration, not least for the reason that homicide is a
significantly harder crime on society than qadhf is, and yet the ḥuqūq of the
individuals involved (the victim’s kin) override those of God.
Historical analysis here might legitimately make demands on legal
analysis of doctrine and reasoning, in that rationalization of doctrine must
be recognized to have come subsequent to particular and often isolated
historical developments. Both qiṣāṣ and qadhf acquired their substantive
content and formal shape prior to the rise of the doctrinal distinction
between ḥuqūq Allāh and ḥuqūq al-‘ibād. Which is also to say that the
doctrine of ḥuqūq is, indeed, a post eventum justification that dialectically
but mildly (if not externally) contributed to the refinements in legal
doctrine at a later stage (mostly after the third/ninth century, when the
legal system had already taken its general shape). We therefore cannot
make too much of it in the way of showing the “naturalistic assumptions”
on the basis of which fiqhī analysis and reasoning created and distributed
rights, duties and public commitments.33

33
Anver M. Emon, “Ḥuqūq Allāh and Ḥuqūq al-‘Ibād: A Legal Heuristic for a Natural Rights
Regime,” Islamic Law and Society, 13, 3 (2006), 325. Further evidence in support of this
claim is the general absence of discussion of these ḥuqūq from uṣūl al-fiqh works,
especially in the parts related to ‘illah and ta‘līl. For an instance of the limited use of
these ḥuqūq in debating issues of uṣūl, see Āmidī, Iḥkām, II, 331-33. It is also plausible to
argue that legal reasoning leads to the classification of legal issues in terms of these
ḥuqūq but the categorization of ḥuqūq itself cannot, on its own, be utilized to conduct
legal reasoning in the fullness of its process. Evidence in support of the mostly
descriptive (as opposed to prescriptive) nature of ḥuqūq is represented in the manner in
which the madhāhib differed in classifying and understanding these ḥuqūq, for it is
certainly the madhāhibs’ general legal principles (which often varied between and
among them greatly) that generated the different understandings and classifications of
ḥuqūq, not the other way around. An insightful lead into the debate about the
descriptive/prescriptive is Walter E. Young’s review of Behnam Sadeghi’s book, The
Logic of Law Making in Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), in the Journal
of the American Oriental Society, 136, 1 (2016), 227-30.

15
IV
But it is also a tall claim to argue for the equation of ḥuqūq Allāh with
political power. Some scholars make strong claims in this regard, equating
ḥuqūq Allāh with “state” control, while others adopt a mitigated version of
these claims in favor of a graded landscape whereby the more the ḥuqūq
inch toward God the more discretion political power has over them. Such
theories may not have taken sufficient notice of two important
considerations: First, the jurisdiction of political power must be
understood in a highly constrained sense, for the role of that power was
executive, not legislative nor judicial. The “state” (in our context an
inaccurate term at best) did not legislate ḥuqūq Allāh, nor did it adjudicate
them as a matter of substantive law. According to some jurists, the sultanic
executive can prosecute certain offenses irrespective of weather or not the
victim initiates a lawsuit. But prosecution here must be understood to
mean the bringing of violators before Sharī‘ah courts and executing those
courts’ judgments against them, with nearly no other function or role in
between. In the majority of cases, the executive only enforced the courts’
verdicts, and this on the terms of a law that was not of its own making. Any
subsidiary sultanic enactments within these spheres were administrative
in the thinnest sense of the word,34 meager in substance, sporadic in
appearance and generally ephemeral (often repealed upon the death of the

34
Thinnest because modernity gives “administrative regulation” a thick “Weberian”
definition that was utterly unknown to Muslim jurists and sultans. On the modern
administrative state as a “bloodless constitutional revolution,” see Gary Lawson, “Rise
and Rise of the Administrative State,” Harvard Law Review, 107 (April 1994), 1231-54.

16
sultan issuing them).35 Furthermore, these administrative measures often
came to reinforce and elaborate on fiqh’s subject matter.
Second, the claim has a short traveling span. As we saw, a significant
part of ḥuqūq Allāh was not of interest to political authority, because they
were deemed to be matters of worship. Aside from managing pilgrimage
logistics, securing roads to Mecca and occasional direct management in the
levy of zakāt, the greater parts of the arkān lay outside of the reach of
political power. The little understood technologies of the self (significantly
residing within the subjective performative power of the arkān) was and
continued to be until the present of no interest to political power, not even
to the modern state or its legislative arm of social engineering. To arrogate
intimate connections between ḥuqūq Allāh and political power is not only
to misunderstand both ḥuqūq Allāh and political power in pre-modern
Islam, but also to subscribe to unfounded and colonialist ideas of “Asiatic
despotism,” ideas initially constructed precisely to justify and rationalize
Europe’s colonialist ventures in Asia and Africa.
Perhaps it is not out of place to note here a representative
Orientalist understanding of these ḥuqūq, one that is both incoherent and
anachronistic. In an article on the subject, Baber Johansen is at pains to
navigate a narrative that genuinely attempts to reconcile his own, though
culturally engrained, biases that emit an “Asiatic despotism” narrative
with a fiqhī counter narrative that insisted on the supremacy of Sharī‘ah’s
rule of law. His choice characterization of ḥuqūq Allāh is the attribute of
the “absolute,” a term that recurs in the article with astounding frequency.
It is not surprising then to read in Johansen that “in the public sphere” the

35
On these themes, see Hallaq, Impossible State, and Leslie Peirce, Morality Tales: Law and
Gender in the Ottoman Court of Aintab (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

17
jurists “expect the individual to act as servant of the public interest.
Therefore the private legal person may not derive any personal advantage
from his role as servant. This is obvious for the ‘claims of God’ which consists
of acts of worship. No worldly reward is granted to the individual legal
person if he performs his prayers or fasts during Ramaḍān.”36 Why does
prayer or fasting now belong to the “public sphere” (a purely modern
conception with specifically modern political contents and connotations)
is not clear. In fact, Johansen does not trouble himself with explaining the
qualitative difference between “penal law” and the arkān (inaccurately
labeled ritual law) insofar as they both equally belong to ḥuqūq Allāh. If
there is any meaning to “privacy” or “private domain,” it is precisely in
that sphere which no political agency can penetrate: that between the
believer’s mind and heart and her God. This is the inner core of the
“private,” something that the genius of the modern state understood so
well that with all its powers of domination and social engineering, it did
not as much as attempt to enter that domain, at least not openly or
directly. But prayer is at one and the same time a “political” concept, not
only because of the assembly rights that it trumps in a group setting, but
also because of its role in the construction of a robust notion of positive
liberty, a notion that is nothing if not pregnant with political
implications.37

36
Johansen, “Sacred and Religious Element,” 299. Emphasis mine.
37
On these implications insofar as the citizen and citizenship are concerned, see Hallaq,
Impossible State, 89-110. The premier elaboration of the concept of negative liberty is of
course Isaiah Berlin’s essay “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Liberty: Isaiah Berlin, ed. Henry
Hardy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 167-217. Berlin’s unqualified fear of
positive liberty was so evident that he left this concept sorely underdeveloped (pp. 178-
81), though sufficiently provocative as to expose the entanglements of negative liberty
with capitalism and political economy of the liberal state. See also Charles Taylor,

18
 I of course need not rehearse here the relationship between what
Johansen calls “reward” and the potent concept of positive liberty that the
technologies of the self engender. This much-neglected form of liberty
gains specific and special importance in cultivating a subjectivity that does
have its own reward (to which mass movements of Sufism surely could
attest). To portray the arkān as mere “rituals” is to miss the power that
prayer and fasting and pilgrimage, among others, engender in the
production of “rights” and “duties” that define the quality of “freedom.”38
This is consistent with the argument I made elsewhere that these arkān
construct a moral subjectivity that transcends but does not ignore politics,
government, or any aspect of material life. If anything, this technology –
which is moral in the first instance – constructs a subject whose
engagement with the minutiae of worldly life is as important as dedication
of the moral self to the ethical design of transcendental power.
Instead of viewing the relationship of prayer and fasting to ḥuqūq
Allāh in this vein, Johansen sees them as indicative of servitude, no more
than an aspect of the manifestation of “surrender” for which Islam is so
well known in Johansen’s Europe. To be in the realm of ḥuqūq Allāh is then
to stand in the “role as a servant.” That’s all the Muslim subject can do vis-
à-vis political power. In fact, it seems that this is just the beginning of
servitude and unprivilege, not their middle or culmination. The process of
servitude can even be elided into subtraction of rights, a servitude that not
only exploits labor but devours whatever wealth remains in the possession

“What’s Wrong with Negative Freedom?" The Idea of Liberty: Essays in Honour of Isaiah
Berlin, ed. Alan Ryan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 175-93.
38
This theme potentially constiutes a fertile research interest that remains entirely
neglected, but one that deserves far more attention and investment than the nearly
useless but nationalistic interests in such questions as, say, the “origins of Islamic law.”

19
of the “state’s” subject. It is not just in prayer and fasting that servitude
appears, but also in ḥuqūq Allāh’s provinces of taxation and criminal law,
“especially in … theft (sariqa).”
The owner of the stolen property can bring the case before
the qāḍī and request punishment of the thief. But if he does
so, he forsakes his claim to financial compensation for his
property. Private claims and liabilities cannot be regulated
by means of public punishment: al-ḥadd wa’ḍ-ḍamān lā
yağ atmi‘ān (sic.; yajtami‘ān). If the government makes use of
its absolute prerogatives, it does not do so in order to secure
private advantages to private legal persons. If a ‘claim of God’
is fulfilled, it excludes the fulfillment of any ‘claims of men’
resulting from the same action. The public and the private
interests cannot be interchanged. God does not tolerate any
sharing of his claims with individual legal persons.”39

Aside from positing oppositional binaries and mutual exclusions of

“interests,” the Muslim God here is made to resemble Europe’s Christian
God as practiced by the medievalist Catholic Church: selfish, intolerant and
even vengeful (we even notice that “God’s rights” now takes over the
native and Arabicate “ḥuqūq Allāh,” which our author uses nearly
everywhere else). In this imagination, God sets himself apart from the very
society he created and does so in virulently oppositional and hostile ways.
It is an imaginary narrative that contradicts the very raison d’ê tre of the
ḥuqūq theory, subverting it and eviscerating its social and ethico-
humanistic intentions.
The ḥuqūq theory was set up not only to define the limits of, and
protect, individual and private “transactions” but also, and perhaps more
importantly, to prop up the technologies of the self and social control as

39
Johansen, “Sacred and Religious Element,”299.

20
integral to the kingdom of God on earth. God here is both sociology and
anthropology; he is economics and practical theology, learning and
mercantile dealings. Far from setting himself apart from society, God is
society and its interests. If zakah’s exclusive raison d’ê tre is to aid the poor,
and if it is simultaneously a ḥaqq Allāh, then God is either the poor or their
embodiment. This charitable institution was not a social project whose
function is to contain crises that are the result of excesses committed, in
the name of a particular political organization, by one class against
another: rather, it was an epitome of a paradigmatic structure that enabled
charity and philanthropy on the widest societal scale ever possible. The
zakāh, ṣadaqāt and waqf40 (this latter claiming an average of fifty-percent of
all real property in the Muslim world)41 extended so far and wide, and so
deeply into the social institutions of Islam across the centuries and
regions, that “God” here acquires a diametrically opposite function and
image to that in which Europe’s Christian God occupied. Ḥuqūq Allāh, as
“God” implemented them in real practice within the redistributive wealth-
institutions and social practices, stood in comparative antithesis to the
extraordinary wealth expropriated by Europe’s Catholic Church for the
expansion of its own power.
It is also no less curious that Ḥanafite law in Johansen’s account is
emphatically characterized as “proprietor”-oriented, yet the same school
that places such a premium on “proprietorship” subordinates the entire
range of its proprietary principles when political authority shows up on
the discursive scene. This quashing of proprietary rights is double-edged,

40
See Miriam Hoexter, “Ḥuqūq Allāh and Ḥuqūq al-‘Ibād as Reflected in the Waqf
Institution,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam, 19 (1995), especially at 136-37.
41
Hallaq, Sharī‘a, 142-46, and especially 402.

21
furthermore. The “state” does not only engage in oppressing individual
rights to property and to transacting in respect of these properties,
however lawful these may be, but it extends its dominion further to
exercise a measure of punitiveness at the expense of the proprietary
individual. It is either the rights of the “state” or of the individual, but not
both. “If a ‘claim of God’ is fulfilled, it excludes the fulfillment of any claims
of men’.”
This interpretation is in fact both factually incomplete and
interpretively wrongheaded. We have seen that while there are rights that
exclusively belong either to God or “man,” there are many more that
contain a mix of the two. The “mix” is a main theme of the jurists’
discourse, one that preoccupied them without respite. A number of
distinguished jurists argued that strictly speaking all ḥuqūq straddle the
God-human spectrum.42 Second, even if Johansen’s interpretation of
Ḥanafite law is correct (which is not), then which Ḥanafite jurists adopted
such positions as he describes in the quoted passage above? What might
Johansen make of those who proffered different views, within and without
the Hanafite school? How did pluralistic doctrine affect actual practice?
An answer to these questions may be a tall order within the confines
of this space: focusing on Johansen’s interpretation of Hanafite doctrine
might nonetheless be sufficient to show the unjustifiable casting of ḥuqūq
in political terms (and much less despotic political terms). It is the
universal juristic doctrine in Sunnite Islam that restoration of the stolen
property and the penalty of amputation are in principle required.43 Abū

42
See the concluding section, below.
43
Abū al-Walīd Muḥammad Ibn Rushd, Bidāyat al-Mujtahid wa-Nihāyat al-Muqtaṣid, ed.
‘Abd al-Razzāq al-Mahdī (Beirut: Dār al-Kitāb al-‘Arabī, 1424/2004), II, 700. “In

22
Ḥanīfa and every member of his school accepted this doctrine. The only
condition that Abū Ḥanīfa -- together with some other Ḥanafites, Thawrī
and Ibn Abī Laylā – insisted on was that the stolen property be itself (‘ayn)
still in existence and retrievable. Otherwise, he held that the meting out of
penalty precludes compensatory damages. Mālik and his colleagues in the
school added that if the thief is well-to-do, then the plaintiff can indeed
pursue damages (that is, even if the stolen object itself is not retrievable)
but this right is waived if the thief is poor. Ibn Rushd explains that the
doctrine which combines punishment with restitution is based on the
reasoning that sariqa trumps ḥaqq Allāh and ḥaqq al-‘abd together, which is to
say that even if the stolen object itself is not to be found, a monetary
compensation is to be made instead, and alongside the punishment. Abū
Ḥanīfa and his followers held that insistence on compensatory damages
and penalty would amount to punishing the same offense twice. For them,
the amputation penalty stands in lieu of damages (inna al-qaṭ‘ huwa badal
min al-ghurm),44 with the distinct implication that the issue for them is one
of fairness toward the thief: however offensive his deed, he should not be
punished twice for the same offense. And this is precisely what Sha‘rānī
argues. In his al-Mīzān al-Kubrā (The Great Balance, a work that attempts to
show how al-Sharī‘ah al-samḥā’ balances and evens things out in its
approaches to society and life45), this jurist explains that the reasoning
behind the various doctrines on this point are concerned exclusively with
the defendant and not the plaintiff or executive authority. In the case of

principle,” because if the stolen object is retrievable, the restitution of the object as well
as the ḥadd penalty become both required (ajma‘ū ‘alā akhdhihi minhu idhā wujida bi-
‘aynihi).
44
Ibid, 700-701. For a general but useful account, see Emon, “Ḥuqūq Allāh,” 367-72.
45
See the Introduction to Sha‘rānī’s al-Mīzān al-Kubrā, especially I, 11.

23
the Ḥanafite single-punishment as well as in the case of waiving the
plaintiff’s right to restitution when the thief is bankrupt, the reasoning is
one and the same: in the first case, leniency that is intended to avert
double punishment; and in the second case, sympathy with the thief’s
poverty. The thief deserve “leniency because there is a whiff of an excuse,
namely, his need and poverty.”46
The Ḥanafite doctrine thus seems more concerned with fairness
toward the defendant than with even preserving the integrity of the
individual’s proprietary rights, however inviolate these latter were. But it
should not escape us that proprietary rights are invoked only insofar as
the stolen property remains in existence, which is to say that if it is not in
existence, the demand that the thief be punished and simultaneously be
required to secure debts to pay for what he stole would have been deemed
both excessive and oppressive. Poverty, in other words, defeats wealth,
and this is a view that would a fortiori preclude the interests of executive
power, routinely seen as potentially and inherently abusive. Thus a proper
reading of juristic discourse on this matter squarely militates against
Johansen’s interpretation. The single, rather than dual, punishment both
protects the defendant from two punishments for one offense and affords
the plaintiff the option of securing his property if he so chooses to do.
But latent misinterpretation does not stop here, nor is it devoid of
self-contradiction. Johansen’s notion of the “absolute” straddles the two
divides of his narrative: on the one hand, it is an oppressive “absolute,”
doing the work of the European narrative of “Asiatic despotism,” and, on
the other hand (when Johansen faces the reality of the jurists and their

46
Ibid, II, 228: “al-taghlīẓ ‘alā al-sāriq bi-wujūb al-ghurm in kāna mūsiran bi-khilāfi al-mu‘sir,
fa-khuffifa ‘anhu li-anna lahu rā’iḥat ‘udhr li-mā ‘indahu min al-fāqah wal-ḥājah.”

24
persistent discourses), it is the Sharī‘a’s unwavering and resilient defense
of individual and communal rights against possible forms of oppression.
“The lawyers,” he recognizes, “try to protect the rights of the individual
against all possible infringements by the authorities. They do this by
closely defining those actions of the political authority that are legitimized
as ḥuqūq allāh, thereby narrowing down the possibility of state interference
in the affairs of the private legal persons.”47
After spending numerous pages speaking of the “absolute” character
of ḥuqūq Allāh as the domain in which the “Islamic state” has “absolute”
rights, Johansen now makes the transition to the jurists’ world and
attributes partial will and agency to them: they “try.” But “trying” turns
out to be more than the term implies, even by Johansen’s account. Just
before the end of the article, “trying” begins to acquire intense
connotations. For “the Ḥanafite lawyers,” he writes, “the ḥuqūq allāh are
the transcendent and religious sphere of the ḥuqūq al-‘ibād and the
necessary framework for their survival. This is why the ḥuqūq allāh are
recognized as absolute by the Ḥanafite lawyers, and for this reason the
government is the trustee of the public interest.”48 Any government
trespassing these frontiers risks the demolition of its own legitimacy. This
is not all, however. A ruler “interfering with the ḥuqūq al-‘ibād should be
treated just like any other person,”49 a juristic doctrine that -- I have
elsewhere argued – amounts to the absence of any immunity associated
with government personnel.50 It appears that the main point Johansen is
attempting to drive home is captured in the following passage: “the
47
Johansen, “Sacred and Religious Element,” 299 (my emphasis).
48
Ibid, 301.
49
Ibid.
50
Hallaq, Impossible State, 68.

25
government is entitled to exercise its absolute prerogative only in order to
protect the realm of the exchange relations of the private owners.
Government action loses its absolute character as soon as it interferes with
the ‘claims of men.”51
It remains unclear what this “absolute” means. All we can assert
with confidence is that only toward the end of Johansen’s account does it
begin to have no place in the sphere of ḥuqūq al-‘ibād. The jurists, he now
seems to say, guarded these ḥuqūq with prejudice. In fact many of them --
as Anver Emon has shown and as our discussion above has suggested --52
insisted on the preponderance of ḥuqūq al-‘ibād over ḥuqūq Allāh when the
two competed for priority of consideration. But what meaning, one might
ask further, does this “absolute” bear in ḥuqūq Allāh if (a) ḥuqūq Allāh were
systemically and systematically identified, reasoned and legislated by a
civil population of jurists -- private individuals whose erudition and
learning (‘ilm) in effect constituted the “legislative” organ through which
the law of the land was constructed and articulated? (b) the law, in its
substantive and procedural components, was administered by a judiciary
that emanated from, and operated within, that autonomous community of
jurists (a community that flourished within a legal epistemology and
system of education of its own making, having been largely insolated from
sultanic interference or management/governmentality; or, to put it in
Foucaultian terms, from any recognizable form of bio-power)? and (c) the
verdict was the work of an autonomous judiciary? What remained in all
this was essentially the execution of the verdict, undoubtedly the business
and task of the executive.

51
Johansen, “Sacred and Religious Element,” 301.
52
Emon, “Ḥuqūq Allāh,” 381-82. See also sec. III, above.

26
 The architecture of the modern state in this picture is entirely
absent, an architecture under whose overwhelming spell Johansen seems
to be writing. The sultanic executive was no such state, not even equivalent to its
executive branch. The sultanic executive did not command the legislative or
the judiciary, except for managing the outer organization of the court
system; it did not make law to speak of (especially when we compare its
qānūns and extra-shar‘ī administrative legislation with the modern
“administrative state”);53 it did not carve out the private and public
spheres, the boundaries of which the modern state delineates, controls,
and constantly negotiates in accordance with a calculus of power that has
itself as its own teleology.54 But most importantly, the sultanic executive
was not invested in the logic of juristic reasoning and its teleology, which
is to say that it saw its function as limited to an enforcer of the law and,
most especially, the enforcer of the punishments of ḥuqūq Allāh, without
this always implying that when people litigated within the sphere of ḥuqūq
al-‘ibād, the government was not at times entrusted with the same duty of
enforcing court decisions.55

V
Representing the common doctrine, Shāṭibī insists that there are no ḥuqūq
that exclusively belong to the individual, ones that are stripped of any
trace of God’s ḥaqq. This, Shāṭibī seems to argue, is an ontological
impossibility. But equally impossible -- based on the cardinal premise that
the Sharī‘ah’s raison d’ê tre is serving nothing less than the best interests of

53
See n. 34, above.
54
See Hallaq, Impossible State, ch. 4.
55
As, for instance, in the case of imprisonment for nonpayment of pecuniary debts.

27
Muslims – is any ḥaqq that is exclusively God’s, for the ‘ibād are, after all,
the matrix and locus of every ḥaqq; without them there would be no ḥuqūq
in the first place. It is customary for jurists, Shāṭibī says, to explain God’s
ḥuqūq as those areas or points of the law where the ‘abd has no choice, no
agency, or no say (lā khīratah fīhi lil-mukallaf),56 and whether these points or
areas were rationally intelligible or not (as in the case of certain “rituals”).
We may, for instance, understand why we should pray, but it is not
entirely clear why the specific timing of these prayers, why, in other
words, these five times, and not others, or why five, not four, seven or
eight. Another way of delimiting the space of these ḥuqūq would be to say
that any ḥaqq relating to the Hereafter is God’s right, whereas ḥaqq al-‘abd
would be that which relates to her concerns and interests in this life.
Which is also to say that the essentially transcendental (and thus not
entirely intelligible) defines the boundaries of God’s ḥuqūq, while that
which belongs to normative human conduct defines the limits of it
counterpart. The distinction then appears to be between ‘ibādāt and ‘ādāt,
the former being “exclusively” God’s while the latter “exclusively” the
believer’s. But in all of this, Shāṭibī is summing up a diversity within unity,
bringing the divine to bear upon the human and vice-a-versa.
Despite the persistence of typology and classification (which
authorize the moral and the legal, splitting and joining at once, at times
delineating enforcement and at others alleviating the unbearable) there
remains a constant and equally stubborn flow and counter-flow between
these “rights.” They rarely ever seem to clash, and never are they defined
in oppositional terms, but are rather conceived as constituting a continuity

56
Shāṭibī, Muwāfaqāt, 233.

28
on a spectrum, and with each other. The highflying ṣūfī who has already
arrived at a stage that dispenses with the techniques of the Sharī‘ah would
find the ebb and flow of ḥuqūq not only most natural for those who need
basic guidance but also descriptive of the limitless diversity within the
greater unity. Little wonder then that Sha‘rānī wrote al-Mīzān al-Kubrā. For
the jurist-ṣūfī or ṣūfī-jurist, these divisions and forced categorizations
ultimately serve these techniques, simplifying the rationalized foundations
of moral-legal obligation. Neither narrative negates the other; if anything,
these are mutually enhancing performative discourses that seek to assert
their own imperatives at best, but always within an overall unifying moral
epistemology and teleology. They are themselves integral to the great
variety whose teleology is One and the same. For the world is ultimately
interconnected through One Logic, One Structure, and One Matter.
Categorization is an old performance, but oppositional fragmentation of
categories is endemic to our modern forms of knowledge. To superimpose
the latter on the former is to make the Other speak a language it never
knew. It is to make the Other even more distant and less intelligible than it
already is.

29
 Select Bibliography

Āmidī, ‘Alī b. Muḥammad Sayf al-Dīn, al-Iḥkām fī Uṣūl al-Aḥkām, ed. ‘Abd al-Razzāq ‘Afīfī,
4 vols. (Riyad: Dār Ṣumay‘ī, 2003).

Emon, Anver M., “Ḥuqūq Allāh and Ḥuqūq al-‘Ibād: A Legal Heuristic for a Natural Rights
Regime,” Islamic Law and Society, 13, 3 (2006).

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