Preliminary Discourse

When Islam hits the headlines it’s always sensationalized. The latest we hear is the national newspaper, The Star’s inadvertent publication of American singer Erykah Badu’s picture with the name ‘Allah’ in Arabic tattooed on her body. Her scheduled concert too has been banned by the authorities. The Star has issued an apology but some maintain that the newspaper should have its license suspended.

John Austin’s ‘command theory of law’ states that ‘law’ is a command issued by a sovereign to its subordinate. If what he says is true, then, how, pray tell, did the sovereign become ‘sovereign’ to start with? Is it not by law too? Then that means law precedes his sovereignty, not the other way around. The only bailout he can secure is that the sovereign becomes what it is by means of social facts (e.g. people’s acceptance, recognition and so on), but then again, what in turn legitimizes those social facts?

If in the past our scholars wrestled with the Jahmites, Jabarites, Mu’tazilites, Sufusta’iyyun, it is thought that modern science today poses a greater challenge to belief than these now defunct sects. Less acknowledged however, is the philosophical bases that constitute modern science which are often the culprit, not the accumulation of empirical data itself, for this by itself is a legitimate pursuit. But rarely are these facts acquired through sense-perception left as raw materials. On the contrary, the organization of these into a coherent whole and the arrival at conclusions themselves presuppose a philosophical framework. It is this philosophical framework that determines what to be studied, what methodology to use and the fundamental assumptions concerning the subject matter, be it nature, man, society or the metaphysical realms. Often they are suppressed and adopted as a valid starting point, with hardly any scrutiny being made as to their veracity. More insidious though, is ...

Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas’ definition of ‘Western civilization’ (along with its relationship to Islam): “By ‘Western civilization’ I mean the civilization that has evolved out of the historical fusion of cultures, philosophies, values and aspirations of ancient Greece and Rome; their amalgamation with Judaism and Christianity, and their further development and formation by the Latin, Germanic, Celtic and Nordic peoples. From ancient Greece is derived the philosophical and epistemological elements and the foundations of education and of ethics and aesthetics; from Rome the elements of law and statecraft and government; from Judaism and Christianity the elements of religious faith; and from the Latin, Germanic, Celtic and Nordic peoples their independent and national spirit and traditional values, and the development and advancement of the natural and physical sciences and technology which they, together with the Slavic peoples, have pushed to such pinnacles of power. Islam too h...

He whose heart is corrupt will find a single word of hate more persuasive than a thousand words of love.

St. Augustine’s “there is no law unless it be just” and St. Thomas Aquinas’ “unjust laws are not laws” (lex injusta non est lex) are reflective of the view, prevalent among the ancients, that law partakes of cosmic significance and not merely applicable to the human domain alone, or much worse to what is commonly understood as state law, that is, “law” as enacted by a legislative body. The Greeks understood law as ‘nomos’, the cosmic “law” that governs all of creation including human beings. What we today would call law (e.g. statutes, case laws) they deemed to be “codes” of law, for no mind of mortal can possibly formulate any principle whose validity is applicable to the whole of cosmos. When the English jurist H.L.A. Hart understood legal positivism as “the simple contention that it is no sense a necessary truth that laws reproduce or satisfy certain demands of morality, though in fact they have often done so”, he already had his definition of “law” messed up, for if he were true ...