A Comparison of the Metaphysical Soundness of Justice & Oppression in Islamic Law with the Ontological Emptiness of Modern Systems
By Huzaifa Ansari
Introduction
Modern legal and ethical discourse treats injustice as the violation of rights. Whether articulated through constitutional guarantees, human rights instruments, or bioethical norms, injustice is primarily identified where legally or morally recognized rights are infringed upon. This rights-centered framework has achieved significant global influence, shaping contemporary conceptions of dignity, freedom, and legal authority. Yet, its scope is limited, and its basic commitments are flawed. What counts as oppression, and which wrongs are capable of being so named, is ultimately determined by the foundational commitments that define the boundaries of rights themselves.
In the modern Western legal tradition, these foundations are largely anthropocentric and procedural. Emerging from post-Enlightenment efforts to manage metaphysical and religious disagreement, rights came to be grounded not in an objective moral order that corresponds with reality as it is (ar: nafs al-amr), but rather in the (assumed) moral status of the human subject, understood primarily as an autonomous rational agent. From Kant onward, law increasingly justified itself by reference to universalizable freedom, mutual non-coercion, and the protection of human dignity, rather than by appeal to metaphysical truth and reality. Justice, on this model, concerns the “fair” terms of coexistence among persons, not conformity to an ontological moral order.
Islamic law, by contrast, operates within a fundamentally different, and, as will be argued, superior moral framework. Rather than limiting rights to those claims necessary for human coexistence, it recognizes a broader structure of moral rights rooted in nafs al-amr (objective reality) as it truly is. Within this paradigm, God is not merely the source of law but a legitimate bearer of rights (ḥuqūq Allāh), the violation of which constitutes injustice and oppression (ẓulm). This idea is epitomized in the Qurʾānic declaration: “Indeed, associating partners with God (shirk) is a great injustice (ẓulmun ʿaẓīm)” (Qurʾan: Luqmān: 13). Here, oppression is not defined by harm to other humans, nor by the disruption of social coordination, but by a violation of objective moral reality itself. Shirk is named as injustice not because it destabilizes coexistence, but because it constitutes a fundamental misalignment with the true order of being. The category of ẓulm in Islamic thought exceeds the modern legal notion of rights-violation, encompassing acts that wrong reality as it is, even in the absence of interpersonal harm. Consequently, acts such as the abandonment of obligatory worship are treated not as private moral failures but as violations of a real moral order with legal and social implications. Islamic law thus affirms rights that modern Western frameworks, by design, exclude from juridical consideration.
This paper argues that the ontological grounding of the Islamic legal paradigm confers upon it two interrelated advantages over modern Western law. First, it enables Islamic law to name and address forms of oppression that Western legal systems cannot coherently recognize, thereby offering a more comprehensive and inclusive scope of moral and legal concern. By deliberately bracketing metaphysical reality in favor of procedural neutrality, modern rights discourse narrows the moral horizon of law, rendering certain wrongs conceptually invisible. Second, it allows Islamic law to derive its authority from a commitment to an objective ontological order, yielding both a sound and internally consistent account of justice, one capable of identifying oppression not merely as a failure of coexistence—a philosophically ambiguous standard—but as a breach of reality itself. Even within the limited domain of human-centered rights that Western law does recognize, its moral judgments are undermined by the absence of ontological grounding, leaving them conceptually unstable and internally incoherent.
Law’s Commitment to Ontology
Law cannot escape metaphysics. Even if it tries, all it achieves is a misaligned view of reality, one that inherently corrupts the morality it seeks to espouse. Law is morality put into policy. Morality is a system of principles concerning right and wrong. Right and wrong are characteristic descriptions of actions; the actions must necessarily exist in some capacity before they can be described as right or wrong. As a consensus amongst moral systems, the rightness and wrongness of said actions depend on what the action is, in what context it is being done, who is doing it, and who it is being done to — all issues of ontology. In addition, the basic determinants of rightness and wrongness, such as the violation and infringement of rights, are inherently ontological. That is, to claim that x is a right or that y is not a right is an ontological claim (i.e, a claim on reality) that needs to be proven. To engage in discussions on morality and ethics without addressing the ontological underpinnings they presuppose is thus philosophically fallacious and intellectually disingenuous.
As legal and moral systems presuppose ontological frameworks, the criterion for evaluating these systems is none other than correspondence with objective reality. It is this correspondence that determines what is real and what is false. A worldview (or ontology) that corresponds with reality is thus real, and consequently, moral and legal systems built on this view will also be real. In contrast, worldviews that do not correspond with reality are false, and moral and legal systems deriving from them will similarly be false. Based on this, it is clear that some moral frameworks are superior to others, insofar as they are built on an ontology that is real. In this vein, ontological non-correspondence would render entire moral frameworks, no matter how popular or accepted, false and unworthy of consideration.
While the misalignment of morality with reality is a serious intellectual crime, it is arguably worse to deliberately sabotage the endeavor of ontological alignment altogether. Many moral systems are guilty of championing false ontological frameworks, but their proponents nevertheless accept the need for a correspondence; their error lay in their belief that their ontology was sound when it wasn’t. Classical Christian and Jewish moral frameworks are examples of this phenomenon: they believed their morality had to be correspondent with reality to be legitimate. Yet, their ontology itself suffered from numerous diseases, such as polytheism and anthropomorphism, among others, disqualifying their moral claims from consideration.
The last few centuries in the West, however, witnessed a new phenomenon, one more sinister than those previous. Beyond a false view of reality, Western thinkers challenged the need for morality to have ontological correspondence altogether. Traumatized by the harrowing violence that religious wars of the centuries prior caused, they sought to divorce morality from reality completely, believing this move would rescue them from political chaos.
The Western Bifurcation of Metaphysics and Law
Early Western thinkers attempted to articulate ontologically grounded moral and legal frameworks. Aristotle’s teleology called for human action to be in accordance with the ultimate telos or goal of human life (eudaimonia, or a life well-lived), deeming actions that contributed to said telos to be good, and those that didn’t to be evil. Aquinas’s natural law posited that morality comes from God’s eternal law, accessible to humans through reason. Christian divine command theory posited that morality and law draw their legitimacy from Divine command, such that an action’s goodness is determined by God commanding it, and its evilness by His forbidding it.
Despite these origins, Western thought eventually divorced morality from ontological grounding altogether. Centuries plagued by religious violence — violence caused by metaphysical disputes — traumatized Western thinkers, leading them to call for morality and law unbound by metaphysical claims. Examples of this violence include the Protestant Reformation and its consequent conflicts: the Thirty Years’ War (between Catholic and Protestant states in the Holy Roman Empire), the German Peasants’ War, and the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. The Thirty Years’ War alone caused around 8 million deaths, the French Wars of Religion caused around 3 million, and the German Peasants’ War had victims in the tens of thousands. This reactive appeal to deontologizing morality and law epitomized itself in the Peace of Westphalia of 1648. The Peace of Westphalia, as a survival tactic (and not a result of philosophical ingenuity), de-emphasized metaphysical uniformity and introduced toleration, which effectively bracketed ultimate truth claims and separated them from the legal.
Western thinkers of this generation advanced this trend: Thomas Hobbes (who grew up in war-torn Spain and then Britain) authored his Leviathan in 1651, in which he rejects morality as being grounded in metaphysical truth, and instead posits that morality is solely political and draws its legitimacy from the power of the state (1). A notable passage therein that demonstrates that justice is solely political, not objective or metaphysical, is found in Chapter 13, where he states:
To this warre of every man against every man, this also is consequent; that nothing can be Unjust. The notions of Right and Wrong, Justice and Injustice have there no place. Where there is no common Power, there is no Law: where no Law, no Injustice. Force, and Fraud, are in warre the two Cardinall vertues. Justice, and Injustice are none of the Faculties, neither of the Body, nor Mind. If they were, they might be in a man that were alone in the world, as well as his Senses, and Passions. They are Qualities that relate to men in Society, not in Solitude (2).
Perhaps most influential of all was Immanuel Kant, who championed deontological ethics, attempting to justify morality without metaphysical authority. Kant alternatively proposed that morality must arise from human sensibilities, not metaphysical realities, a claim manifest in his Groundwork (3). One snippet that captures this theme is found in Chapter 2 of the Groundwork, wherein Kant writes:
What I have said makes five things clear: all moral concepts have their origin entirely a priori in reason; moral concepts can’t be formed by abstraction from any empirical knowledge (4).
According to Kant, the pivot of morality is on the foundational principle that humans possess dignity due to their capacity for rational autonomy. This dignity is absolute, such that morality and immorality are determined through its fulfillment and violation. In other words, morality pivoting on the unalienable and priceless dignity of all humans, the violation of which is reprehensible, finds its roots in Kant. Morality, according to Kant, is determined through human dignity and autonomy to facilitate co-existence. In the conclusion of Chapter 2 of the Groundwork, Kant says:
Morality is thus the relation of actions not to anything external to the person, but to the autonomy of the will. Now, here are definitions, in terms of the autonomy of the will, of five key terms in morality: An action that can co-exist with the autonomy of the will is permitted. One that clashes with the autonomy of the will is forbidden (5).
Following Kant, Western thought generally retained human beings as the axis of morality, with the preservation of their dignity (in the form of rights) being its end-all, and thus that of law. Crucially, this moral and legal framework is defined by its rejection of metaphysical correspondence. It is not just failing to articulate a sound ontology; it is deliberately eliminating its relevance. John Rawls, an American political philosopher, explicates this in his Justice as Fairness, wherein he writes:
Thus, the aim of justice as fairness as a political conception is practical, and not metaphysical or epistemological. That is, it presents itself not as a conception of justice that is true, but one that can serve as a basis of informed and willing political agreement between citizens viewed as free and equal persons (6).
Besides these writings, other dimensions of Western society also reflect this philosophical change. Institutionally, there was the formal separation of church and state. Semantically, legal language shifted from accommodating metaphysical terminology, such as “sin” and “blasphemy,” to procedural anthropocentric terms of “unalienable rights” and “dignity”.
The absence of ontological grounding in Western legal thought thus reflects a deliberate historical response to centuries of religious conflict and political collapse, driven by attempts to enforce metaphysical truths through law. This development is evident in contemporaneous philosophical writings, institutional reforms, shifts in legal language, and explicit political settlements, most notably the Peace of Westphalia.
Ontological Neutrality: Performative Inconsistency
Despite Western claims of being ontologically neutral — a fallacious claim in and of itself, as seen earlier — a brief reading of their philosophy reveals that the “neutral” morality championed by the West in reality has its own ontological suppositions. As explained above, it is simply not possible for a moral or legal framework to be free of an ontological worldview. Thus, the Western claim of not enforcing metaphysics in its morality and law is performative, not real.
The key ontological supposition in Western morality, the necessary premise that supports the entire model, without which it crumbles, is that humans have absolute dignity. This dignity is to be cherished and preserved, manifesting in the form of natural, unalienable, human rights. It is the preservation of these rights that justifies actions, and their violation that renders acts immoral. However, the claim that humans possess dignity deserving of preservation and protection is inherently metaphysical, as it is not empirically deducible. Yet, no ontological substantiation is provided for it. It is not even addressed as a metaphysical claim, but instead conveniently overlooked to maintain the illusion of metaphysical neutrality. The Western model is thus metaphysically participant, except that it outwardly denies it.
The internal inconsistency notwithstanding, the assumed metaphysical premise suffers from two severe ailments. Firstly, it is ontologically unsubstantiated. There is no demonstration (burhān) of these principles, only appeals to “autonomy” that themselves require metaphysical justification. Secondly, it is extremely limited in its scope. Morality is premised solely on the human, and even that is done through philosophically unstable claims of dignity. No other element of reality is taken into consideration. God, the Real Existence, the Living, the source of human existence, is completely ignored. Even if God’s Existence were granted by the Westerner, it is effectively treated as non-living, in that He holds no bearing on morality or law. In this way, they attempt to “kill God”, Exalted and Majestic is He. Furthermore, the absence of God in their framework causes it to crumble — how is human dignity to be substantiated ex nihilo? What is the source of human dignity? Rational autonomy is cited as a cause for dignity, but where is the evidence of this claim? These claims are wholly unsubstantiated and unworthy of philosophical consideration, given the lack of evidence and metaphysical grounding.
In short, Western law and morality fail the test of realness and, therefore, truthfulness on two counts. First, they actively deny the need for ontological correspondence in morality and law. From this alone, it is evident that these models cannot be true, insofar as truthfulness is correspondence to reality, which is not just absent here, but rejected altogether. Second, despite the performative rejection of ontological correspondence, Western law and morality are inherently subscribed to a metaphysical framework that excludes God as a Living and Real Being, and establishes human dignity and autonomy ex nihilo. This metaphysical orientation is primarily corrupted by the faulty view of God not being a Living Being whose Existence is relevant to morality. It is further deconstructed by the unsubstantiated metaphysical claim of human dignity and autonomy.
The Islamic Paradigm: Morality as the Entailment of Ontology
The Islamic paradigm of law and morality, or any other subordinate paradigm of Islam, can be succinctly described as a holistic reading of reality. It is the content of existence (wujūd) itself that translates into law, morality, and ethics. Thus, the various thought systems advanced by Islam in these domains are directly entailed by ontology, not distinct from it.
The Qurʾan is replete with exhortations of ḥaqq and extensive dispraise of bāṭil. Falsehood (bāṭil) is the complete juxtaposition of reality (ḥaqīqa) and thus the epitome of evil and vice. In contrast, ḥaqīqa epitomizes what is good and pure. It is crucial to note that ḥaqq, ḥaqīqa, and bāṭil are inherently ontological terms; they speak of what does or does not exist in nafs al-amr.
The telos of human existence is alignment with reality, or ḥaqīqa, for if man were not aligned with it, he would be embracing falsehood, or bāṭil. This alignment equally applies to the intellectual, physical, and spiritual. Therefore, any view of morality, law, ethics, politics, or any other intellectual domain must take all of ḥaqīqa into account to fulfill the imperative of realistic alignment and escape from bāṭil.
For a moral framework to be good and true, then, it must wholly embrace and reflect reality as it is. It cannot discriminate some elements of the Real over others, as such an endeavor would constitute an embracement of bāṭil, insofar as it is a deficient view of reality. In other words, a moral framework that presupposes a deficient or faulty view of reality is false, and therefore functionally useless. This necessarily implies the existence of an objectively and ontologically real morality, given that the metaphysics are real. Moral, legal, and political judgments are therefore taking all of reality into account — the physical and the metaphysical equally. This is the holistic ontological approach of Islam.
With a holistic metaphysical orientation, beings that are otherwise ignored in the Western system are recognized as real and living. Chief amongst this category is God Almighty. An earnest investigation into reality reveals that there must be a God ascribed with attributes of perfection, given that imperfection entails temporality. One of these attributes is Life (ḥayāt). Thus, God is Real, or al-Ḥaqq, and Living, or al-Ḥayy. When God is al-Ḥayy and al-Ḥaqq in the metaphysical system, the relevant philosophical entailments apply — namely, that He is going to have rights (ḥuqūq), just as humans and other living beings (such as jinn and animals) do. This is not a rhetorical declaration, but an ontological one. The rights of God, humans, and other creations are real. When Islam affirms Divine Rights, it is affirming an element of reality.
Once God is recognized as a right-bearer, the violation of His rights, termed ḥuqūq Allāh, is equally criminal and unjust as the violation of other right-bearers. It is, in fact, more criminal, given His Existence is the Real Existence, and in light of the wujūd-based ethics espoused above, a violation of the rights of al-Ḥaqq constitutes a violation of reality at the most essential level.
Furthermore, the rights of other beings, namely humans, are not the product of human sensibilities as Kant claims, but rather ḥuqūq existent by virtue of God’s existence — that is, God, the Real Existent, afforded these rights to humans, implying their existence in reality absolutely, irrespective of rational perception of these rights (7).
Implications of the Divine as a Right-Holder
As the purview of the law is to enforce objective morality, which in turn dictates that each existent thing be given its due, it necessitates that the law would enforce the rights of any existent thing with respect to the fulfillment or infringement of those rights. Therefore, the violation of the rights of a recognized rights-holder, whoever it may be, falls within the purview of the law.
As a result, the fulfillment of Divine rights, or ḥuqūq Allāh, is not just a private ritual devotion, but a legal obligation, one enforceable by the law. Similarly, the violation of these rights is more than a private devotional failure; it constitutes a crime (jurm) and injustice (ẓulm), warranting legal interference.
From this, it is evident that a Muslim’s refusal to fulfill the five prayers is a violation of the recognized right of God, and is therefore punishable according to the law. All matters of worship (ʿibādāt) and many issues of transactional (muʿāmalāt) and criminal law (jināyāt wa ʿuqūbāt) are analogous in this regard: their fulfillment is obligatory as a Divine right, and their violation constitutes a crime. Theological heresies also violate the right of God, rendering them criminal and unjust (8).
These injunctions should not be viewed as religious coercion and violation of human dignity, as these labels assume an anthropocentric view of reality and morality. Human dignity does not permit a person to commit crimes. It does not permit him to violate the laws of reality and the rights of others, especially those of God. Any moral system that prioritizes human dignity to the extent that it permits infringement of legitimate rights is chaotic and self-defeating. Moreover, human dignity, the premise of anthropocentric views of morality, is only found in man’s ability to be in harmony with the Real. Humans have the unique disposition and potential to fully align with reality and reflect the Divine, a feature mentioned by God Himself in the Qurʾan: “Verily, We have created man in a most excellent form” (9). However, man’s rebellion against the cosmic order is an occasion for the plummeting of his rank. “Then, We sent him back as the lowest of the low” (10). It is only through a submission and alignment with the cosmic order that he retains his nobility: “Except for those who believe and practice righteous actions: for them is a reward, unending” (11).
Thus, all matters of worship, or ʿibādat, ascend beyond the station of private devotion to that of enforceable rights. It is for this reason that all Islamic legal compendia and manuals open with ʿibādāt as the first topic addressed. To say that “the legal matters begin after the ʿibādāt” would be disloyal to the conceptualization of Muslim jurists (fuqahāʾ). They rightly viewed the ʿibādāt as a legitimately legal discussion, given that the pivot of all of the issues was the fulfillment of ḥuqūq Allāh, an inherently legal topic (12).
The recognition of Divine Rights also extends to discussions of legal theory. The Islamic legal theorists (uṣūliyyūn) have dedicated much attention to the issue of ḥuqūq Allāh and ḥuqūq al-ʿibād. Because these two categories are viewed as metaphysically real and ontologically grounded, the implications of this viewing are thoroughly addressed, such as the potential instance of a clash of the two, known as ijtimāʿ ḥaqq Allāh wa ḥaqq al-ʿabd.
The Paradigm of Ẓulm
In light of the ontological entailment that Islamic morality is characterized by, ẓulm is accordingly defined as a deviation from this cosmic order. Things have set loci (maḥāll) that they are expected to be delivered to in this order. Rights must be delivered to their respective holders; alms must be disbursed to their respective recipients; worship must be presented to its sole ḥaq-dār. This is not the assignment of a human intellect; it is the nature of the cosmos as it is. A deviation from this would constitute ẓulm, rendering it intrinsically evil, insofar as it rebels against reality as a whole.
Shirk (polytheism) is a principal example of ẓulm, as it is the ultimate violation of reality and existence. The Oneness of the Divine is the foundational reality upon which all of existence stands. It is what gives all of wujūd intelligibility. Shirk is not a heinous, vile crime because it disturbs societal unity and cohesion (as Western thought would claim). It is rather a transgression, violation, and infraction upon all of reality. It disturbs existence itself. The disturbance is so severe that the cosmos, if left to its devices, would descend into chaos on account of this crime. The Qurʾan echoes this reality: “They say the Raḥmān has taken a son. Indeed, you have advanced an abominable claim that the heavens are well-nigh to explode at it, and the earth to burst apart, and the mountains to fall down crumbling, in protest of attributing children to the Raḥmān. (13)” It is only through Divine forbearance (ḥilm) that these consequences do not come to pass. Allah states: “Indeed, Allah withholds the heavens and the Earth from dissipating, and if they were to dissipate, not one would be able to regain them thereafter. Verily, He is forbearant, forgiving. (14)” Thus, to violate the entire cosmos by uttering words of polytheism is an injustice of the highest order. It is for this purpose that the Qurʾa states: “Indeed, shirk is supreme injustice. (15)” The Qurʾan, through this verse, comes to the rescue of human thought by demonstrating that ẓulm, an inherently lego-moral concept, extends beyond human-to-human interaction and is, in fact, epitomized in a theological declaration. In contrast, Western law relegates matters of theology to the private sector, diabolically ignoring the greatest form of crime that can ever be committed (16).
Other forms of ẓulm will share with shirk in that they are transgressions against an objective cosmic order, except they will be of varying degrees of intensity. In summary, ẓulm can be concisely articulated as the misappropriation of rights in a manner that violates an objective cosmic order (17).
Given the heinous and vile nature of ẓulm and its juxtaposition with reality, Allah, al-Ḥaqq, is the furthest Being from it. Accordingly, Allah states: “Indeed, Allah does not commit ẓulm even to the measure of a particle. (18)”
The framing of ẓulm in this way yields another noteworthy contrast from the Western alternative: ẓulm also addresses human-self interactions. In the Western model, injustice is limited to human-to-human violations of dignity and autonomy. In the reality-based Islamic model, ẓulm constitutes a deviation from reality, which would equally apply to human-to-God, human-to-human, and human-to-self interactions. Thus, just as an individual can commit ẓulm by neglecting or infringing on Divine Rights, as well as fellow human rights, he can similarly commit ẓulm against himself by violating the rights of his soul or body. The Qurʾa frequently addresses those who “wrong themselves” (19). The Prophet ﷺ approved Salmān al-Fārsi’s saying to Abū al-Dardāʾ concerning the balancing of the three types of rights: “Your Lord has a right over you, your self has a right over you, and your family has a right over you, so give each right-holder their due right.” Upon hearing this, the Prophet ﷺ stated: “Salmān has spoken the truth. (20)” Western conceptions of morality fail to articulate an intelligible moral system concerning the man with his self, as a moral framework centered on cooperation and mutual non-coercion cannot address matters of the self that do not pertain to the rights of others.
Conclusion
The divergence between the Islamic and modern Western legal paradigms ultimately reflects a deeper disagreement about the relationship between law, morality, and reality itself. Modern Western law, having emerged from a deliberate reactive effort to avoid metaphysical adjudication, restricts legal concern to the regulation of human coexistence and the protection of human interests alone. In doing so, it excludes from legal and moral consideration the most Real Being, thereby severing justice from ontological truth. The Qurʾān intervenes precisely at this juncture by reasserting divine rights (ḥuqūq Allāh) as ontologically and morally real, naming violations as injustice, instead of mere devotional failings: “Indeed, associating partners with God is a great injustice”. These formulations exemplify a lego-moral framework in which injustice is not defined by metaphysically ungrounded notions of interpersonal “harm” or procedural unfairness, but is constituted by misalignment with objective moral reality (nafs al-amr).
The Western paradigm fails the standard of truthfulness in two respects: first, through its explicit bracketing of ontological reality as legally irrelevant, and second, through its implicit reliance on unsubstantiated metaphysical assumptions, such as autonomy and dignity, that it simultaneously claims to avoid.
Islamic justice, by contrast, is ontological and teleological, understanding moral obligation as the necessary entailment of being itself, and law as the mechanism by which human action is aligned with the comic order. Where modern Western justice is procedural and political, aimed at securing “fair” coexistence among human beings, the Islamic paradigm conceives justice and oppression as correspondence and deviation from reality as it truly is. In this sense, the Islamic model does not merely expand the scope of rights beyond modern frameworks, but offers a more coherent account of justice, one that revives what has been conceptually abandoned, restoring law to its proper relationship with reality.
Notes
(1) Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Oxford University Press, 1929) 96.
(2) Ibid.
(3) Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysic of Morals (Bennet, 2005) 14-17.
(4) Kant, Groundwork 17.
(5) Kant, Groundwork 36.
(6) John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: Political Not Metaphysical (Summer, 1985) 230.
(7) This is not to say that these rights are unable to be rationally detected, but that they retain a station of existence beyond the confines of human reason. It is because they exist in reality that reason may be able to recognize them, not the other way around.
(8) It is worthy of note that Non-Muslims practicing their faith in a Muslim country as sanctioned by Divine Law (i.e, not proseltyzing, paying the jizya, keeping the peace) does not constitute a violation, which is why it is not penalized. Therefore, there is no inconsistency in the methodology.
(9) Qurʾan, al-Tīn: 4.
(10) Qurʾan, al-Tīn: 5.
(11) Qurʾan, al-Tīn: 6.
(12) Concerning the translation of fiqh as “Islamic Law”, I have heard a critique of this translation stating that fiqh concerns matters beyond the law, such as the affairs of worship and purity, and so this translation does not loyally denote fiqh’s contents. However, from the demonstration above, it is clear that matters of worship and purity are within the purview of the law, thereby justifying such a translation.
(13) Qurʾan, Maryam: 88-91.
(14) Qurʾan, al-Fāṭir: 41.
(15) Qurʾan, Luqmān: 13
(16) It is diabolical (i.e, of or originating in Diablo, the Devil) because the occurrence of shirk is the project of the Devil. Anything that leads to shirk, therefore, is in line with the Devil’s aims, as well as the elimination of obstacles to shirk. Islam, an ontology-based legal system, does not allow for shirk to run rampant, and is effectively its antidote. In doing so, it sets back the Devil’s plans. By introducing legal systems that disregard theological crimes, this obstacle is removed, furthering the Devil’s aims, thereby making it diabolical.
(17) The philsophers have famously defined ẓulm as وضع الشيء في غير محله, or placement of a thing in other than its due locus. This definition has been critiqued as being too loose, and not capturing the inherently evil nature of ẓulm.
(18) Qurʾan, al-Nisāʾ: 40.
(19) See: Yūnus: 44 & al-Aʿrāf: 177.
(20) Muḥammad b. Ismāʿīl al-Bukhārī, al-Jāmiʿ al-Ṣaḥīḥ (ʿAṭāʾāt al-ʿIlm) 2:231.
