Reimagining Islamic Principles in Pakistan

By Yasser Latif Hamdani

One of the first things that will strike a student of law is that the English common law tradition, which informs the legal systems of India and Pakistan, is at variance with the established Roman law that informed much of the non-English-speaking Western world. At the same time, common law has parallels with the classical tradition of Islamic law as it developed in and around Al Azhar at the beginning of the middle ages. Like English common law, the Islamic equivalent relies largely on precedent and the legal opinions of jurists. Ijtehad, that is, reinterpretation; Ijmah, that is, consensus; and Qiyas, that is, analogy, form the basis of an opinion or decision. The last of these is not unknown to those who have practiced law in common law jurisdictions.

“Islamic Secularism”?

 By Yasser Latif Hamdani

Reformulating the Ground Rules

The definition of modernity expressed in political science terms is a system of state and society whereby social justice is aspired to, freedom of belief, ideology and conscience is fully protected and where rule of law reigns supreme.  As the Islamic World increasingly finds itself confronted with modernity in these terms, there are two responses that have been recorded  as two opposing currents – first response is to accept modernity without any discounting for Islamic principles or any attempt to reconcile the Islamic identity of the Muslims world -wide and the second response is to reject it so completely that the room for negotiation between this response and modernity ceases to exist.  Both these responses ignore one basic fundamental contention that most Muslims have i.e. Islamic principles are universal in so much as that they can be adapted to the time and age through the internal process of Ijtehad. Therefore the standoff between Islam and modernity that seems to preoccupy the intelligentsia of the Islamic world need not be a zero-sum game. Indeed there is enough room to incorporate the fundamental perimeters of modernity within an Islamicate culture without compromising either.