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Alice’s Adventures, Abductive Reasoning and the Logic of Islamic Law

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Abstract

How does a Muslim jurist think the law and how, accordingly, he judges a fact? Using Alice in Wonderland as hermeneutical device to explore the logic of fiqh, this article identifies a divergence between Western and Islamic legal thinking in the application of abduction as key form of inference in the law of Islam. In particular, looking at the fact/law relation in symbolic terms, the article highlights how, while a dichotomy between fact and law characterizes Western legal thinking, fiqh upholds a connection between the “real” and the “right” (ḥaqq), where the effort (ijtihād) in understanding sharī‘ah postulates the actualization of the “rule” (ḥukm) in God’s creation. Thus, if sharī‘ah pre-scribes the Law, not only is the rule discovered through the sources (uṣūl), but the right has to be justified through a verdict de-scribing the fact, for the law to be validly stated for the given situation. In this sense, abduction as explanatory “hypothesis” (Peirce) and “inference to the best explanation” (Harman) of sharī‘ah provides an account for the probabilistic nature of fiqh, its ramification (furū‘) through verdicts, as well as for the epistemic and narrative function of the tradition as core aspects of the logic of Islamic law. At the same time, doubts can be raised about the compatibility between this logic and the deductive logic of modern state law, as a sub-product of Western legal thinking.

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Notes

  1. As well-known, Lewis Carroll (pseudonym of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, 1832–1898), wrote his novel to collect the fantasy stories that he invented for little Alice Liddell during a boat trip in Oxford. For a comprehensive portrait of Alice’s world, see Gardner [14].

  2. The verb “to judge” is used here in the sense of “assessing”, “evaluating” the fact in order to define its legal qualification and derive/discover the legal effects from the revealed sources. The intellectual activity of the Muslim jurist can result in a legal opinion (fatwā) or be related to the judiciary, when he acts as qāḍī.

  3. The adoption of Western law as “study-language” to investigate non-Western “targets” constitutes, in my opinion, the issue par excellence of comparative law methodology. In this sense, Norman Calder notes how “Western scholarship (even when written by Muslims) has rarely presented Islamic law in such a way as to demonstrate its value rather than the values of the observer” [7, p. 979].

  4. Following the Austro-Hungarian scholar Eugen Erlich, the sociological approach theorizes the likely divergence between the theory and practice of law. In this regard, Palmer remarks how “Roscoe Pound’s essay on Law in Books and Law in Action immediately followed Erlich’s work and Max Weber stressed that formal law is often modified or subverted at the level of application” [39, p. 283].

  5. A doctrine dealing with “the nature of signs the mind makes use of for the understanding of things, or conveying its knowledge to others” [30, p. 461].

  6. In fact, “the representamen and its semiotic object are mediated by a third term, the interpretant. As a result of such mediation, the sign takes on value, meaning, and importance as a representamen doing its thing along with its neighbors within the vast river of semiosis—the process of signs becoming other signs” [33, p. 34].

  7. “From the perspective of the Muslim jurist, legal theory can be regarded as the “science of proofs”, leading to standards that regulate human actions. These standards derive primarily from a discovery… of the aḥkām, the qualification… or, more specifically, God’s determination of the moral value of individual acts” [50, p. 33].

  8. “To Him is due the primal origin of the heavens and earth. When He decreeth a matter, He saith only “Be,” and it is” (Qur’ān II:117) (see also Qur’ān III:47, 59; VI:73; XVI:40; XXXVI:82; XL:68). In this sense, the word “will” is also expressed by “the term mashī’ah, “volition”, and so it is that the word shay’, “thing”, deriving from the same root, is sometimes glossed as “what has been willed [by God] to exist” [38, p. 192].

  9. “The occasion is, of course, preceded by an order to do something. But… it is nevertheless the occasion that brings the duty into effect and not the command” [42, p. 197].

  10. The dogma of the absolute sovereignty of God is linked to an atomistic conception of time, inserting the flow of human contingent agencies in the eternal creativeness of God. Accordingly, al-Ghazālī upheld that “the world comes to be at the time when the eternal… stands in nexus with its coming-to-be” [38, p. 193]. God’s personal command, “Be! and it is” (kun fa-yakūn) governs any event in time: “Allāh is the Lord of each instant” [5, p. 58].

  11. Similarly to Geertz, Hallaq stresses how in Islam “the physical world is not a scientific site subject to cold and bland rational explanation and calculation but rather a natural world saturated with spirituality and psychology, one wholly subservient to moral actions taken by the very humans that were created by God” [19, p. 84].

  12. A term that he claimed corresponds to what Aristotle describes in Prior Analytics, II, ch. 25 (CP: 7.249) [41].

  13. “[W]hereas deduction and induction were demoted to merely phases of testing an already formed hypothesis” [11, p. 471].

  14. “What one quickly finds is that legal theory manuals are dedicated neither to the induction of principles nor the deduction of injunctions, for both are considered already resolved” [2, p. 6].

  15. To my knowledge, Ahmed’s book is the first work on Islamic law to refer explicitly to Peirce’s abduction to explain the logic of fiqh, prior to the present study.

  16. Since the verse al-Baqarah 283 exclusively refers to evidentiary problems arising from the parties’ inability to record a contract away from urban centres.

  17. “Explanatory considerations” that are not necessarily based on available revelatory sources, but can also be grounded on “juristic preference” (see § 4.2.1).

  18. Zakāt as (2.1) a personal duty to God; (2.2) a communal duty implemented by the Imām; (2.3) a functional provision for the poor.

  19. Deductive reasoning does not exclude that also induction (especially in common law countries) and abduction appear in Western law [17]. But, with specific regard to modern state law, the centrality of the rule as “major premise” (“established”, positum, by state sovereignty), however it later intervenes in the formulation of the judgment, represents an element that cannot be denied (§ 5).

  20. Johansen specifically refers to al-Sarakhsī (d. 1096 AD)’s Mabsūṭ and al-Kāsānī (d. 1191 AD)’s Badā’i‘‘l-Ṣanā’ī‘in his study.

  21. “Max Weber… opposes what he calls “substantive rationality” (materiale Rationalität) to “formal rationality” (formale Rationalität). Substantive rationality dominates a sacred law in which ethical imperatives, political maxims or utilitarian rules of expediency are developed into norms or general principles and take the place which… the logical generalization of abstract principles [as part of a coherent system] occupy in a law which is characterized by the “formal rationality”” [24, pp. 49–50].

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    Valentino Cattelan

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Cattelan, V. Alice’s Adventures, Abductive Reasoning and the Logic of Islamic Law. Int J Semiot Law 29, 359–388 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-016-9459-8

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