Yaser M. Haddara

I came across a pearl today as I was reading al-I’tisam by Imam al-Shatibi. I have reproduced it in Arabic below and done my best to translate it after. Inshaa Allah I will be referring back to it in the future when I get to write my follow-ups to the Little Mosque discussions. For now I just thought I’d share the raw quote — food for thought :)

Please keep in my mind that I am not a scholar. The Arabic is copied from the edition by Dar al-Hadith, Cairo. The English is my best shot at a translation. Please don’t assume you can be a scholar just by reading a quote on a blog ;).

ومدار الغلط في هذا الفصل إنما هو على حرف واحد، وهو الجهل بمقاصد الشرع، وعدم ضم أطرافه بعضها لبعض، فإن مأخذ الأدلة عند الأئمة الراسخين إنما هو على أن تؤخذ الشريعة كالصورة الواحدة بحسب ما ثبت من كلياتها وجزئياتها المرتبة عليها، وعامها المرتب على خاصها، ومطلقها المحمول على مقيدها، ومجملها المفسر بمبينها، إلى ما سوى ذلك من مناحيها، فإذا حصل للناظر من جملتها حكم من الأحكام فذلك الذي نظمت به حين استنبطت

وما مثلها إلا مثل الإنسان الصحيح السوي، فكما أن الإنسان لا يكون إنسانا حتى يستنطق فينطق لا باليد وحدها ولا بالرأس وحده ولا باللسان وحده، بل بجملته التي سمي بها إنسانا، كذلك الشريعة لا يطلب منها الحكم على حقيقة الاستنباط إلا بجملتها، لا من دليل منها أي دليل كان، وإن ظهر لبادي الرأي نطق ذلك الدليل، فإنما هو توهمي لا حقيقي، كاليد إذا استنطقت فإنما تنطق توهما لا حقيقة، من حيث علمت أنها يد إنسان لا من حيث هي إنسان لأنه محال

فشأن الراسخين تصور الشريعة صورة واحدة يخدم بعضها بعضا كأعضاء الإنسان إذا صورت صورة متحدة

The axis of error in this area is a single issue: ignorance of the objectives of the Law and failure to gather its branches one with the other. The approach of firm-footed leading scholars in finding and interpreting evidence is for the Sacred Law to be taken as a whole thing according to what is established of its universals and the particulars that are based upon them, its general pronouncements that rank below specific ones, its unqualified statements whose import is determined by statements that include qualifications and specified criteria, its generalized statements that are explained through its spelled out ones, and so on in terms of all the aspects of the Sacred Law and its texts. Thus when an investigator finds a ruling established through its totality, then that is the ruling that the Scared Law entails when it is mined for meaning. (I can’t be sure but I believe there is a typo in the Arabic here, so that it should be نطقت not نظمت — if so, then “entails” would be replaced with “states” or “pronounces”).

A perfect analogy for the Sacred Law in this is that of a whole and sound human being. Just as a human being is not truly one - for example when he is made to speak and he speaks - not by his hand alone, not by his head alone, not by his tongue alone, but by his totality by which he is called a human being, so also the Sacred Law cannot be sought to rule upon the veracity of an interpretation except in its totality, not through one piece of evidence, whatever kind of evidence it may be. If it appears at first sight that that one piece of evidence has spoken then this is mere illusion not reality, just as if we were to require a hand to speak up it could only oblige in imagination not in reality, as we know it to be the hand of a human being not a human being, so that this is impossible. (The “this” that is impossible in the last sentence I understand to both the analogy of a hand actually speaking and the original image of a single piece of evidence sufficing to establish a ruling without regard for the totality of sharee’a — ymh).

Therefore, the practice of those that are firm-footed is to consider the Sacred Law as an integrated whole, each part serving the rest, just as the organs of the human being are imagined in an integrated entity. (I have used firm-footed as translation of rasikhoon, which is a term used in the Quran in Aal Imran to refer to truly knowledgeable people who follow the truth rather than their own whims — ymh)