research and writing in the field of Islamic Law, Ethics, and Theology (Sunni and Shiite) for more than four decades. In the last twenty years he has concentrated on social and political ethics, including Interfaith and Intrafaith Relations, Islamic Biomedical Ethics and Islam and Human Rights. He is the author of numerous books, including Islam and the Challenge of Human Rights (2009).
Sachedina applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Islamic Ethics: Fundamental Aspects of Human Conduct, and reported the following:
Page 99 of my book does reveal the quality of the whole book.Learn more about Islamic Ethics at the Oxford University Press website.
From page 99:Scriptural Sources of Ethical Methodology 99Page 99 is the key page in telling the readers the following:
humankind with “upright nature” to achieve a balance between the “known” (the convictions determined through the process of reflection) and the “unknown” moral judgments by placing the known in history and culture at the same time. Consequently, the Qur’an anchors moral norms in the reflective process and invites human beings to ponder the consequences of their actions and learn to avoid any behavior that leads to perilous ends. Moreover, it appeals to the human capability for learning from past destructiveness preserved in historical accounts in order to avoid it in future. The assumption in the Qur’an is that there is something concrete about human conditions that cannot be denied by any reasonable persons endowed with “hearts to understand,” that is, a conscience to judge its consequences (Q. 22:46).
The concept of a known pre-revelatory moral language in the Qur’an does not fall short of acknowledging the concrete historical and social conditioning of moral concepts. But it stipulates that people living in different cultures must seek to elicit the universal ideal out of the diversity of concrete human conditions—a common foundation upon which to construct an ethical language that can be shared cross-culturally in the project of creating a just public order. Both the clearly stated and the implicit moral values in the Qur’an point to concrete ways of life in different cultural idioms that must be understood in order to extricate the universal values and to apply them in other contexts. The moral and spiritual awareness that ennobles human existence and leads it to carry out duties to God and other humans functions as a torch of the divinely created innate human nature, enabling it to discover the universals that can build bridges of understanding across cultures.
With the weakening of the critical emphasis on ethical reasoning in Muslim cultures, although Muslim societies are traditionally religious-minded, the importance attached to past juridical formulations without understanding their generalizable moral justifications has led to the neglect of undergirding moral norms as the most fundamental aspect of the overall scriptural guidance. This means that a religious worldview comprised of exclusionary Islamic beliefs about the supernatural and orthopraxy has continued to shape social and political attitudes and interpersonal relationships and to provide existential meaning as well as security in the ever-changing human relations in modern life. Nonetheless, the major source for the secular skepticism of the religious world-view and scriptural reason in general, and Islamic tradition in particular, is the historically disruptive character of religious politics, and the endless religiously inspired violence in many parts of the world that disrupts normalcy beyond repair.
Historically, religion in the public domain has been disruptive of necessary social cooperation and cohesion based on some consensus about the equality of all citizens in a modern nation-state. The classical interpretive jurisprudence
Historically, the critical question for Muslim religious thought has been to establish a logical epistemological connection between the two fields of law and ethics to demonstrate a cognitively undeniable correlation between reason and revelation in derivation of authoritative orthopraxy. The debatable aspect of this attempt to affiliate law and ethics was whether such a relationship could be shown to be solely the product of a religious worldview firmly founded upon scriptural authority of the Qur’an and the Sunna, or whether it was possible to guide human moral conduct with minimal reference to revelatory sources. The idea about the correlation between the findings of reason and those of revelation was the result of the logical necessity connected with continuation of reliable guidance for the post-prophetic developing and culturally diverse Muslim societies.
The present study on Islamic ethics comes at almost the end of my career in academia. From all that I had studied in my history, philosophy, and Islamic studies courses I was confident that there existed a far-reaching connection between religion and ethics in Islamic tradition. My graduate work in Islamic studies further confirmed the contours of the debate among Muslim scholars who often deliberated about the priority of locating ethics as a fundamental source for deriving epistemic guidelines about human conduct. Historically, the critical question for Muslim religious thinkers has been to establish a logical epistemological relation between the two fields of law and ethics to validate a cognitively undeniable correlation between reason and revelation in derivation of authoritative orthopraxy. The controversial aspect of this attempt to affiliate law and ethics was whether such a relationship could be shown to be solely the product of a religious worldview firmly founded upon scriptural authority, or whether it was possible to guide human moral conduct without reference to any revelatory sources. The emerging idea was about the relationship between reason and revelation to provide continuous guidance for the developing and culturally diverse Muslim societies, principally by taking into consideration historical circumstances that determined the contemporary social and political practice. The main thrust of the classical Muslim intellectual development was to anchor moral epistemology reliably within the primarily religious sources to underscore its inseparable and logical relationship to interpretive jurisprudence that provided time-specific responsa in general to resolve pressing issues related to everyday practice. The universal moral truth that was endowed by God’s nature (fitrat allah) in humankind and was acquired rationally did not require religious affiliation or scriptural justificatory reasoning. The more immediate religious inquiry was not to explore the sources of human conduct; rather, it was to comprehend divine will as it related to human life in this and the next world. God’s will, as declared by the revelation, was embodied in the divinely ordained system that would define and formulate the boundaries of orthopraxy. This was the scope of the emerging field of interpretive jurisprudence (al-fiqh) in the classical period.
--Marshal Zeringue
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