Shariʿa blended moral and legal norms before modernity separated them.
Evidence
- Whenever the reference is to the Shariʿa, my use of the term “legal” connotes a concept, phenomenon, or category that must always be taken as subservient to the moral, this latter being an enveloping structure of norms that, conversely, both subordinates and commands the legal. In a system that did not differentiate between the moral and the legal, but was a comingled admixture of both (as the Shariʿa was for centuries before the onset of modernity), the segregated uses of the terms, including the “moral,” must be understood as conditioned by modernity’s inescapable conceptual-linguistic repertoire that insists on corralling the two terms into separate spheres. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 947
Categorization
- DEFINE: Clarifies Hallaq’s systematic use of ‘legal’ as subservient to ‘moral’ in the Shariʿa context — a definitional cornerstone of his argument.
- DEEPTHINKING: The claim that the moral-legal separation itself is a contingent artifact of modernity’s conceptual-linguistic repertoire, not a universal category, is dense and paradigm-shifting for legal theory.