By Abdul Sattar
The first issue learned in intermediate and advanced classes of Sharīʿah often involves multiple hours spent understanding what parts of the body should be washed before worship. Is the elbow included in washing one’s arms or not? What are the boundaries of the face? Why those boundaries? How should we understand the words “hand”, “face”, and “wash” in the context of the Arabic language, grammar, and usage of the Arabs at the time Revelation came down? What evidences do we have from the Prophet ﷺ, his Companions, and their students on how they implemented this? Students will explore these questions from the four major schools of Islamic Law and how they agreed or disagreed.
Of course not every person, nor even every person learning their religion needs to ever read these discussions. Seminary students do it in a few classes of Sacred Law and that’s it.
Someone totally unacquainted with the depth and breadth of Islamic Law might find this boring at best, or downright harmful, overly ritualistic, and backwards at worst. What are students doing spending so many hours on these ‘useless fiqhi business’ issues?
A few months later, those same students will confront the following questions:
1. What is the status of a shared wall, common area, or demarcated space between two property owners and what constitutes the true boundary between them? Who has what rights in the Sharīʿah if one or more decide to sell or modify their property?
2. When a contract is drafted and an issue of property stipulates “till that wall” or “till this garden”, or “till this street”, is the marker included or not included? What if the contract did not explicitly say “up to and including” and the various parties have two different ideas about what it meant when they agreed?
This can be significant as a property issue, a public good issue, or anywhere where there is a disagreement over lines. Modern municipal codes have spelled these out by locality to ensure justice and fairness, and for the same the Sharīʿah similarly provides guidance to ensure that no one walks away from a contract being treated unjustly.
3. When an international boundary is being discussed, what demarcates the line? What if a river or natural feature of the land is the agreed upon marker — is the river included in one country or the other? What about international contracts where a contract is written in one language and translated into another and both parties share no common language and the understanding differs according to the translated contract?
4. How do laws regarding theft affect shared computer servers and intellectual property? What demarcates “private property” and “public accessible property” on a shared machine?
What we learn from this is that the first question that was discussed about ritual washing, trained the student in using language, law, etymology, grammar, usage, legal precedent, and legal custom — to process a relatively simple issue about worship. It allows the student to get one’s hands wet (pun intended) in the reasoning and methodology needed to understand legal clauses, boundaries, limits, demarcating objects, and issues in which an object that is joined needs to be treated as two different objects.
What the student is really learning is: What are principles governing a limiting thing (boundary) and the limited thing, what happens when the genus of each is the same, or different, and how do they differ in matters of ritual, marital, financial, and governmental law in the Sharīʿah? How can these applications be reconciled to be true to the Revealed texts, and the principles of justice, and be consistent with each other?
At the end, what you have is a student who ideally knows each issue very well, and at the same time has developed the skills to tackle larger issues and will do so in the curriculum as each chapter and topic shows up in his/her legal studies.
When we see the ritual worship issue as being silly to discuss, but all the others as being of some level of importance — it also highlights our prejudices as Muslims about our own Dīn. Fundamentally, that international borders, property rights, eminent domain, contracts, and matters of this world are more worth discussing than whether or not we have made Wuḍūʾ correctly so we can stand before our Lord. In reality, the matter of worship is more central in terms of its ability to grant us access to success in the Hereafter and the pleasure of God. We will be asked if we gave everyone their rights in the world, but first — we will be asked about Prayer.
For those of us who wish to revive Islamic civilization and bring its principles of justice, mercy, fairness, and equity to bear against the problems of our world — we should be grateful there are people studying, preserving, and propagating the Prophetic understanding and discussions on these matters in fine detail.
