Meta-Theory and the Borders of Islamic Legal Theories
Thursday, March 31, 2022 3:30 PM to 5:30 PM EDT
Horizon Hall, 2014
Please join the Modern & Classical Languages department and ALI VURAL AK Center for Global Islamic Studies on Thursday, March 31 to hear a lecture titled, “Meta-Theory and the Borders of Islamic Legal Theories” by Dr. Asad Q. Ahmed.
Islamic legal theories appear to be underdetermined in their justifications. This lecture reflects on how pre-modern legal theorists attempted to offer a grounding for legal theories by developing a set of principles extraneous to the elements of the four uṣūl. The lecture takes up the architectonics of istiṣḥāb as an example of this phenomenon. It surveys discussions from the fifth-century hijrī, a period during which the first sustained and sophisticated discussions on the topic appear in the sources. And it posits that, during its first period of sustained analysis, the conceptual framing of istiṣḥāb reflected intuitions about a universal proof theory.
In particular, legal theorists were concerned with establishing justifiable grounds for taking positions on the status of legal judgments that transcended the scope of established legal argumentation methods, and that, in the same vein, they wished to determine whether the probative force of certain principles of legal argumentation was temporally continuous. As such, theories of istiṣḥāb were of a second-order: they validated legal judgments and theories in cases of argumentative vacuums, serving as principles of derivation out of the very absence of recognizable proof.
Asad Q. Ahmed is a Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies in the Department of Near Eastern Studies and Affiliate Faculty in the Department of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley.
He specializes in early Islamic social history and pre-modern Islamic intellectual history, with a special focus on the rationalist disciplines, such as philosophy, logic, legal theories, and astronomy.
The lecture is live-streamed on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Wh263Pp1te0
