Mairaj U. Syed is an Associate Professor in the department of religious studies at the University of California, Davis. His research explores the history of Islamic legal and ethical thought, particularly areas dealing with public law, family law, and politics. He is also interested in the development of hadith literature and the social network that transmitted and preserved it in the first 250 years of Islamic history. Syed holds Ph.D. in religion from Princeton University, and a bachelor's degree in Business Administration from University of Texas, Austin. Phone: 609-751-2279 Address: One Shields Avenue
Davis, CA 95616
The preeminent meditation on plagues and pandemics from the Islamic world, now in English for the... more The preeminent meditation on plagues and pandemics from the Islamic world, now in English for the first time. A Penguin Classic. Six hundred years ago, the author of this landmark work of history and religious thought—an esteemed judge, poet, and scholar in Cairo—survived the bubonic plague, which took the lives of three of his children, not to mention tens of millions of others throughout the medieval world. Holding up an eerie mirror to our own time, he reflects on the origins of plagues—from those of the Prophet Muhammad’s era to the Black Death of his own—and what it means that such catastrophes could have been willed by God, while also chronicling the fear, isolation, scapegoating, economic tumult, political failures, and crises of faith that he lived through. But in considering the meaning of suffering and mass death, he also offers a message of radical hope. Weaving together accounts of evil jinn, religious stories, medical manuals, death-count registers, poetry, and the author’s personal anecdotes, Merits of the Plague is a profound reminder that with tragedy comes one of the noblest expressions of our humanity: the practice of compassion, patience, and care for those around us.
In Coercion and Responsibility in Islam, Mairaj Syed explores how classical Muslim theologians an... more In Coercion and Responsibility in Islam, Mairaj Syed explores how classical Muslim theologians and jurists from four intellectual traditions argue about the thorny issues that coercion raises about responsibility for one's action. This is done by assessing four ethical problems: whether the absence of coercion or compulsion is a condition for moral agency; how the law ought to define what is coercive; coercion's effect on the legal validity of speech acts; and its effects on moral and legal responsibility in the cases of rape and murder.
Through a comparative and historical examination of these ethical problems, the book demonstrates the usefulness of a new model for analyzing ethical thought produced by intellectuals working within traditions in a competitive pluralistic environment. The book compares classical Muslim thought on coercion with that of modern Western thinkers on these issues and finds significant parallels between them. The finding suggests that a fruitful starting point for comparative ethical inquiry, especially inquiry aimed at the discovery of common ground for ethical action, may be found in an examination of how ethicists from different traditions considered concrete problems.
This article surveys the three approaches—source-critical, phenomenological, and hermeneutical-th... more This article surveys the three approaches—source-critical, phenomenological, and hermeneutical-theological—that prevail in the historiography of consensus in early, classical, and modern Islamic legal thought. The source-critical approach dominates the historiography of the early period. Scholars using this approach question the narrative found in classical Islamic legal theory: that specific verses of the Qur’an or Hadith of Muhammad establish consensus as a source of law. They believe instead that consensus emerged gradually, in response to the social needs of the Muslim community. Scholars using the phenomenological approach seek to define the doctrine of consensus in classical Islamic legal theory whilst scholars using the hermeneutical-theological approach view consensus as a powerful argument in issues of Islamic thought today. These approaches are not mutually exclusive and scholars often combine them. The article ends with identification of the areas for growth in future stu...
Historians rely on hadiths (narratives about Muhammad) as a source for writing the history of ear... more Historians rely on hadiths (narratives about Muhammad) as a source for writing the history of early Islam. Each hadith is preceded by an isnād, which is a list of names purporting to give the sequence of individuals who transmitted it. Scholars apply a variety of methods to the isnāds of hadiths in order to determine their dates and geographic origins. These methods presuppose the absence of inadvertent mistakes in the names cited. Because the hadith literature is so voluminous and unwieldy, the systematic discovery and correction of these mistakes using manual methods is unfeasible. We introduce new computational and statistical methods for automatically detecting a subset of these errors and correcting them. We do so by investigating the citations of sources in the isnāds documented in the digital hadith repository, Gawāmiʿ al-Kalim.
Networks are an especially powerful way to represent complex systems. They constitute many of the... more Networks are an especially powerful way to represent complex systems. They constitute many of the systems that underlie much of our infrastructure and social interactions, as well as ecological and biological systems that control and regulate life. While the underlying architecture of many networks is usually static, it is often connected to numerous dynamical processes that are the results of the functional processes that occur on it (Barrat et al. 2008). Moreover, many complex systems exist diachronically and thus their structures are in flux. For these reasons, a robust network analysis of such complex systems requires temporal information in order to account for this dynamic element. This paper demonstrates the viability of applying trophic analysis, a method originally
One widespread historical method of transmitting and recording information about important events... more One widespread historical method of transmitting and recording information about important events and people in the Middle East is the narration-based method. In this method, each saying about a person or event is transmitted from person to person until a systematic collector records and compiles such sayings in a stable collection. At each stage of transmission, the narrator not only transmits the saying but also the person he got it from going back to the earliest narrator. Identifying each narrator in these collections is important to better measure the accuracy of the narrations and identify the date and geographies of their circulation. In this work, we propose a natural language processing technique to automate the identification of narrators in classical Arabic texts. Our proposed technique consists of two models: 1) a model for detecting the narrators in the text, and 2) a model for linking narrators to their biographies. We train our two models on a large collection of annotated classical Arabic texts and achieve F1scores of 96.15% and 95.74% for narration detection and linking respectively.
Proceedings of the Fifth Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop, 2020
Arabic, like other highly inflected languages, encodes a large amount of information in its morph... more Arabic, like other highly inflected languages, encodes a large amount of information in its morphology and word structure. In this work, we propose two embedding strategies that modify the tokenization phase of traditional word embedding models (Word2Vec) and contextual word embedding models (BERT) to take into account Arabic's relatively complex morphology. In Word2Vec, we segment words into subwords during training time and then compose word-level representations from the subwords during test time. We train our embeddings on Arabic Wikipedia and show that they perform better than a Word2Vec model on multiple Arabic natural language processing datasets while being approximately 60% smaller in size. Moreover, we showcase our embeddings' ability to produce accurate representations of some out-of-vocabulary words that were not encountered before. In BERT, we modify the tokenization layer of Google's pretrained multilingual BERT model by incorporating information on morphology. By doing so, we achieve state of the art performance on two Arabic NLP datasets without pretraining.
Explores the use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) to identify canons (qawāʿid), maxims, and s... more Explores the use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) to identify canons (qawāʿid), maxims, and substantive principles in Islamic law.
An initial exploration of the character of canons (qawāʿid) in Islamic law, the institutional set... more An initial exploration of the character of canons (qawāʿid) in Islamic law, the institutional settings in which they are most useful, and some of the main problems historians and ethicists face in the scholarly analysis of them.
Provides a succinct summary of an analytical framework for the analysis of rationality bound by a... more Provides a succinct summary of an analytical framework for the analysis of rationality bound by allegiance to schools of thought
This paper is a blog written for the Islamic Legal Studies Program at Harvard university. It prov... more This paper is a blog written for the Islamic Legal Studies Program at Harvard university. It provides a succinct survey of conceptual frameworks that describe and explain the character of rationality in Islamic positive law (fiqh): the four sources approach, legal school essentialism, historical contextualism, and legal functionalism. It also identifies the shortcomings of each approach.
Historians rely on hadiths (narratives about Muhammad) as a source for writing the history of ear... more Historians rely on hadiths (narratives about Muhammad) as a source for writing the history of early Islam. Each hadith is preceded by an isnād, which is a list of names purporting to give the sequence of individuals who transmitted it. Scholars apply a variety of methods to the isnāds of hadiths in order to determine their dates and geographic origins. These methods presuppose the absence of inadvertent mistakes in the names cited. Because the hadith literature is so voluminous and unwieldy, the systematic discovery and correction of these mistakes using manual methods is unfeasible. We introduce new computational and statistical methods for automatically detecting a subset of these errors and correcting them. We do so by investigating the citations of sources in the isnāds documented in the digital hadith repository, Gawāmiʿ al-Kalim.
This article analyzes reports about the capture and torture of the companion ʿAmmār b. Yāsir and ... more This article analyzes reports about the capture and torture of the companion ʿAmmār b. Yāsir and their later use in the exegesis of Kor 16,106. It also shows why the reports were generated by different sectarian communities (Imamī Šīʿites, Zaydites, Murǧiʾītes) in the different parts of the early Islamic empire (Kufa, Mecca, Medina, Basra, and Jazira) in the late first/seventh and early second/eighth centuries. Through a detailed and comprehensive analysis of the isnāds of reports, the article shows that it is possible to correlate information about the sectarian affiliations of reports’ transmitters with the contents of the reports and in the process show why different communities remembered and transmitted the specific forms of the reports that they did. The article shows how literary Islamic sources are susceptible to a much more granular historical analysis than previously assumed.
This paper compares the way two philosophers, John Rawls and Jeffrey Stout, imagine the proper ro... more This paper compares the way two philosophers, John Rawls and Jeffrey Stout, imagine the proper role of religious thought in democracies. It applies their ideas to the case of Islamic advocacy of political policies in modern Muslim society. It argues that the use of religious language in political advocacy does not by itself undermine democratic deliberation.
The preeminent meditation on plagues and pandemics from the Islamic world, now in English for the... more The preeminent meditation on plagues and pandemics from the Islamic world, now in English for the first time. A Penguin Classic. Six hundred years ago, the author of this landmark work of history and religious thought—an esteemed judge, poet, and scholar in Cairo—survived the bubonic plague, which took the lives of three of his children, not to mention tens of millions of others throughout the medieval world. Holding up an eerie mirror to our own time, he reflects on the origins of plagues—from those of the Prophet Muhammad’s era to the Black Death of his own—and what it means that such catastrophes could have been willed by God, while also chronicling the fear, isolation, scapegoating, economic tumult, political failures, and crises of faith that he lived through. But in considering the meaning of suffering and mass death, he also offers a message of radical hope. Weaving together accounts of evil jinn, religious stories, medical manuals, death-count registers, poetry, and the author’s personal anecdotes, Merits of the Plague is a profound reminder that with tragedy comes one of the noblest expressions of our humanity: the practice of compassion, patience, and care for those around us.
In Coercion and Responsibility in Islam, Mairaj Syed explores how classical Muslim theologians an... more In Coercion and Responsibility in Islam, Mairaj Syed explores how classical Muslim theologians and jurists from four intellectual traditions argue about the thorny issues that coercion raises about responsibility for one's action. This is done by assessing four ethical problems: whether the absence of coercion or compulsion is a condition for moral agency; how the law ought to define what is coercive; coercion's effect on the legal validity of speech acts; and its effects on moral and legal responsibility in the cases of rape and murder.
Through a comparative and historical examination of these ethical problems, the book demonstrates the usefulness of a new model for analyzing ethical thought produced by intellectuals working within traditions in a competitive pluralistic environment. The book compares classical Muslim thought on coercion with that of modern Western thinkers on these issues and finds significant parallels between them. The finding suggests that a fruitful starting point for comparative ethical inquiry, especially inquiry aimed at the discovery of common ground for ethical action, may be found in an examination of how ethicists from different traditions considered concrete problems.
This article surveys the three approaches—source-critical, phenomenological, and hermeneutical-th... more This article surveys the three approaches—source-critical, phenomenological, and hermeneutical-theological—that prevail in the historiography of consensus in early, classical, and modern Islamic legal thought. The source-critical approach dominates the historiography of the early period. Scholars using this approach question the narrative found in classical Islamic legal theory: that specific verses of the Qur’an or Hadith of Muhammad establish consensus as a source of law. They believe instead that consensus emerged gradually, in response to the social needs of the Muslim community. Scholars using the phenomenological approach seek to define the doctrine of consensus in classical Islamic legal theory whilst scholars using the hermeneutical-theological approach view consensus as a powerful argument in issues of Islamic thought today. These approaches are not mutually exclusive and scholars often combine them. The article ends with identification of the areas for growth in future stu...
Historians rely on hadiths (narratives about Muhammad) as a source for writing the history of ear... more Historians rely on hadiths (narratives about Muhammad) as a source for writing the history of early Islam. Each hadith is preceded by an isnād, which is a list of names purporting to give the sequence of individuals who transmitted it. Scholars apply a variety of methods to the isnāds of hadiths in order to determine their dates and geographic origins. These methods presuppose the absence of inadvertent mistakes in the names cited. Because the hadith literature is so voluminous and unwieldy, the systematic discovery and correction of these mistakes using manual methods is unfeasible. We introduce new computational and statistical methods for automatically detecting a subset of these errors and correcting them. We do so by investigating the citations of sources in the isnāds documented in the digital hadith repository, Gawāmiʿ al-Kalim.
Networks are an especially powerful way to represent complex systems. They constitute many of the... more Networks are an especially powerful way to represent complex systems. They constitute many of the systems that underlie much of our infrastructure and social interactions, as well as ecological and biological systems that control and regulate life. While the underlying architecture of many networks is usually static, it is often connected to numerous dynamical processes that are the results of the functional processes that occur on it (Barrat et al. 2008). Moreover, many complex systems exist diachronically and thus their structures are in flux. For these reasons, a robust network analysis of such complex systems requires temporal information in order to account for this dynamic element. This paper demonstrates the viability of applying trophic analysis, a method originally
One widespread historical method of transmitting and recording information about important events... more One widespread historical method of transmitting and recording information about important events and people in the Middle East is the narration-based method. In this method, each saying about a person or event is transmitted from person to person until a systematic collector records and compiles such sayings in a stable collection. At each stage of transmission, the narrator not only transmits the saying but also the person he got it from going back to the earliest narrator. Identifying each narrator in these collections is important to better measure the accuracy of the narrations and identify the date and geographies of their circulation. In this work, we propose a natural language processing technique to automate the identification of narrators in classical Arabic texts. Our proposed technique consists of two models: 1) a model for detecting the narrators in the text, and 2) a model for linking narrators to their biographies. We train our two models on a large collection of annotated classical Arabic texts and achieve F1scores of 96.15% and 95.74% for narration detection and linking respectively.
Proceedings of the Fifth Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop, 2020
Arabic, like other highly inflected languages, encodes a large amount of information in its morph... more Arabic, like other highly inflected languages, encodes a large amount of information in its morphology and word structure. In this work, we propose two embedding strategies that modify the tokenization phase of traditional word embedding models (Word2Vec) and contextual word embedding models (BERT) to take into account Arabic's relatively complex morphology. In Word2Vec, we segment words into subwords during training time and then compose word-level representations from the subwords during test time. We train our embeddings on Arabic Wikipedia and show that they perform better than a Word2Vec model on multiple Arabic natural language processing datasets while being approximately 60% smaller in size. Moreover, we showcase our embeddings' ability to produce accurate representations of some out-of-vocabulary words that were not encountered before. In BERT, we modify the tokenization layer of Google's pretrained multilingual BERT model by incorporating information on morphology. By doing so, we achieve state of the art performance on two Arabic NLP datasets without pretraining.
Explores the use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) to identify canons (qawāʿid), maxims, and s... more Explores the use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) to identify canons (qawāʿid), maxims, and substantive principles in Islamic law.
An initial exploration of the character of canons (qawāʿid) in Islamic law, the institutional set... more An initial exploration of the character of canons (qawāʿid) in Islamic law, the institutional settings in which they are most useful, and some of the main problems historians and ethicists face in the scholarly analysis of them.
Provides a succinct summary of an analytical framework for the analysis of rationality bound by a... more Provides a succinct summary of an analytical framework for the analysis of rationality bound by allegiance to schools of thought
This paper is a blog written for the Islamic Legal Studies Program at Harvard university. It prov... more This paper is a blog written for the Islamic Legal Studies Program at Harvard university. It provides a succinct survey of conceptual frameworks that describe and explain the character of rationality in Islamic positive law (fiqh): the four sources approach, legal school essentialism, historical contextualism, and legal functionalism. It also identifies the shortcomings of each approach.
Historians rely on hadiths (narratives about Muhammad) as a source for writing the history of ear... more Historians rely on hadiths (narratives about Muhammad) as a source for writing the history of early Islam. Each hadith is preceded by an isnād, which is a list of names purporting to give the sequence of individuals who transmitted it. Scholars apply a variety of methods to the isnāds of hadiths in order to determine their dates and geographic origins. These methods presuppose the absence of inadvertent mistakes in the names cited. Because the hadith literature is so voluminous and unwieldy, the systematic discovery and correction of these mistakes using manual methods is unfeasible. We introduce new computational and statistical methods for automatically detecting a subset of these errors and correcting them. We do so by investigating the citations of sources in the isnāds documented in the digital hadith repository, Gawāmiʿ al-Kalim.
This article analyzes reports about the capture and torture of the companion ʿAmmār b. Yāsir and ... more This article analyzes reports about the capture and torture of the companion ʿAmmār b. Yāsir and their later use in the exegesis of Kor 16,106. It also shows why the reports were generated by different sectarian communities (Imamī Šīʿites, Zaydites, Murǧiʾītes) in the different parts of the early Islamic empire (Kufa, Mecca, Medina, Basra, and Jazira) in the late first/seventh and early second/eighth centuries. Through a detailed and comprehensive analysis of the isnāds of reports, the article shows that it is possible to correlate information about the sectarian affiliations of reports’ transmitters with the contents of the reports and in the process show why different communities remembered and transmitted the specific forms of the reports that they did. The article shows how literary Islamic sources are susceptible to a much more granular historical analysis than previously assumed.
This paper compares the way two philosophers, John Rawls and Jeffrey Stout, imagine the proper ro... more This paper compares the way two philosophers, John Rawls and Jeffrey Stout, imagine the proper role of religious thought in democracies. It applies their ideas to the case of Islamic advocacy of political policies in modern Muslim society. It argues that the use of religious language in political advocacy does not by itself undermine democratic deliberation.
This article analyzes reports about the capture and torture of the companion ʿAmmār b. Yāsir and ... more This article analyzes reports about the capture and torture of the companion ʿAmmār b. Yāsir and their later use in the exegesis of Kor 16,106. It also shows why the reports were generated by different sectarian communities (Imamī Šīʿites, Zaydites, Murǧiʾītes) in the different parts of the early Islamic empire (Kufa, Mecca, Medina, Basra, and Jazira) in the late first/seventh and early second/eighth centuries. Through a detailed and comprehensive analysis of the isnāds of reports, the article shows that it is possible to correlate information about the sectarian affiliations of reports’ transmitters with the contents of the reports and in the process show why different communities remembered and transmitted the specific forms of the reports that they did. The article shows how literary Islamic sources are susceptible to a much more granular historical analysis than previously assumed.
Islamic jurisprudential theory has historically asserted that the constitutional legitimacy of an... more Islamic jurisprudential theory has historically asserted that the constitutional legitimacy of an Islamic legal rule is measured solely by the degree to which it maintains fidelity to the two primary scriptural sources for Islamic norms, the Qurʾān and the Sunnah (the exemplary conduct of Prophet Muhammad). Current historical scholarship has accepted this as a fact describing how different types of legal norms are actually formulated in discursive practice closer to the ground. However, I show that such a model cannot explain the emergence of a curious development in the jurisprudence on the problem of coerced acts in the eleventh and twelfth century. A handful of jurists asserted that the law should simply assume as a matter of fact that a ruler, a slave-owning master, and a husband’s mere command was implicitly backed by a coercive threat, thereby mitigating or cancelling the legal/moral responsibility of the subject, the slave, or the wife. Thus, for instance, simply the fact of being commanded by a ruler, a master, or a husband to commit a crime constituted a excuse for mitigating the legal penalty normally consequent upon the willful commission of the crime. This position is a far cry from the legal rules that were constructed strictly from the most authoritative scriptural sources. Strictly speaking the main constitutional texts for the jurisprudence on coercion simply assert that the existence of coercion creates grounds for either the mitigation or complete cancellation of the legal and moral effects of the coerced acts. I will describe the development of the jurisprudence on coercion from the seventh till the eleventh centuries attempting to explain the factors that lead to the emergence of what I call the disparate-power coercion position in eleventh and twelfth centuries. In doing so, I hope to show that the framing of certain imagined empirical situations as presumptions that the law should simply assume in a given case was an important discursive strategy to expand and temper criminal law by taking into account the fundamental disparity of power that constituted some social relationships in Islamic Society.
Scholars interested in the structure of reasoning in Islamic law have mostly focused on legal the... more Scholars interested in the structure of reasoning in Islamic law have mostly focused on legal theory (uṣūl al-fiqh). This focus has led to the neglect of positive law (fiqh) and responsa (fatāwa), as sources of ethical reasoning. As a result, current scholarship mischaracterizes the method of reasoning in Islamic law as predominantly textual. In this picture, justification for Islamic positive rules consists primarily of interpretation of canonical texts, the Qur’an and ḥadīth. I think this picture is wrong based on my study of reasoning in classical Ḥanafite and Shāfiʿite fiqh texts on issues related to coercion and responsibility. Some positive law texts in both traditions have long and fascinating discussions that display characteristics of moral reasoning John Rawls describes as the method of reflective equilibrium. This is especially the case of Shaybānī, Sarakhsī, and Juwaynī’s discussion on coercion involving bodily harm to others. Each of the authors begins his discussion by introducing a simple paradigm case and describing the normative rule that applies to it. The discussion then unfolds by changing factual elements in the paradigm case to see what happens to the normative rule. A typical example sets up the following empirical case: a credible coercer threatens your life and demands you kill an innocent bystander. The normative rule at stake describes coercion’s effect on the distribution of moral and legal responsibility for the crime between the coercer and coerced if you kill the innocent bystander. Subsequent discussion involves changing an element of the case to
discover its effect on the distribution of responsibility between coerced and coercer. For example, what if the threat was amputation? What if the threat was imprisonment? What if the coercer gave the coerced a choice between raping or killing a bystander? What if the coercer gave the coerced a choice between killing one of two people? What if the coercer made no explicit threat? What if the coercer threatened the coerced’s life and demanded he cut-off an innocent bystander’s finger? Medieval authors manipulated the facts of the case to explore its implications on the normative rule and the distribution of responsibilities between the agents involved. By doing so, I argue that they were testing the limits and interaction of moral principles that tugged the distribution of responsibilities in conflicting directions. Many legal presumptions and principles came into conflict in coerced bodily harm jurisprudence. Examples of such are: the principle of the equality of protection from all harm, the presumption that the physical author of a crime ought to be held responsible, the coercer’s empirical role in forcing the coerced’s act. They were doing what jurists in legal systems have always done: ethical deliberation by balancing conflicting values to arrive at a just solution. I will conclude the paper by comparing the types of reasons offered in medieval legal discourse on the problem of coercion and murder with positions taken and justifications offered in Anglo-American thought. One conclusion of my inquiry is that cross-cultural comparative investigation of ethical thought can successfully reveal competing values, not rooted in the contingent circumstances of a given author’s context, that structure a given ethical problem.
Religion and law are ubiquitous features of human societies. This course will consist of a compar... more Religion and law are ubiquitous features of human societies. This course will consist of a comparative investigation of these two phenomena across different religious traditions, time periods, and areas of the world. In the first two-thirds of the course, we will analyze how Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have conceived of the law, primarily by looking at how these religions regulated the institution of marriage. In the last third of the course, we will analyze how the emergence of modernity affected the way the law was conceived by the different religions. We will end the course by looking at how religion is involved in debates about family law in three different modern societies: Israel, the United States, and Egypt.
This course is an introduction to Islamic ideals of conduct, character, and community, and to med... more This course is an introduction to Islamic ideals of conduct, character, and community, and to medieval and modern disputes over their interpretation and application. We will investigate the nature and different types of Islamic ethical reasoning by looking at specific issues, such as abortion, contraception, warfare, salvation, and the virtues. Throughout the course we will consider the implications of these debates on our own understanding of the relationships between ethics and morality and the role of religion in public life.
This course is divided into three thematic units. In the first unit, will read and discuss about ... more This course is divided into three thematic units. In the first unit, will read and discuss about two-thirds of the Qur’an, paying close attention to the literary form and structure of individual surahs, and the prevalent theological and ethical ideas present in the text. In the second unit we will examine scholarly theories and debates on the date of the text’s composition. In the third and final unit we will look at how different Muslim thinkers have interpreted the Qur’an throughout the ages on the issues of salvation, jihad, and God’s nature.
Ghazali (448/1056—505/1111) is arguably the most influential and famous pre-modern Muslim intelle... more Ghazali (448/1056—505/1111) is arguably the most influential and famous pre-modern Muslim intellectual in Islamic history. He lived at a time when the Sunni caliphate had lost de facto power and the Egyptian Ismaili Shiis were aggressively proselytizing their religious and political ideology in the Sunni heartlands. The disciplines of learning representing law, ethics, mysticism, and philosophy that would largely constitute medieval intellectual culture had established distinctive identities, accepted modes of reasoning, and what each considered the most important questions meriting human inquiry. The exemplary practitioners within each of these traditions claimed that they exclusively represent the best moral vision of the human individual and his place in society. Given this context, Ghazali set himself two primary aims: the formulation of a political ideology that could vigorously oppose Ismaili Shiism and fashion a coherent vision of the Islamic ethical life out of the disparate and conflicting strands of thought represented by the practitioners of law, ethics, philosophy, and mysticism. This seminar will be a study in Ghazali’s synthetic vision of what constitutes the Islamic life lived well.
Within a few generations after the death of Muhammad Muslims developed complex legal and theologi... more Within a few generations after the death of Muhammad Muslims developed complex legal and theological traditions that shaped the boundaries of what was deemed Islamic. In Coercion and Responsibility in Islam: A Study in Ethics and Law (Oxford University Press, 2017), Mairaj Syed, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at University of California, Davis, examines how the constraints of interpretive traditions were tested under questions of coercion. He demonstrates that very often theological and legal reasoning moves beyond our expectations and interpretive conclusions are contradictory within seemingly uniform schools. He shows how members of the Mu’tazila and Ashari schools of theology determine the legal and moral responsibility of individuals who have been pressured to say or do something under coercive conditions. He also explores Hanafi and Shafi’i legal definitions of coercion and the various types of reasoning principles for drawing what is licit. These conundrums are hashed out through hypothetical coerced speech acts, such as proclamations of divorce, sale transactions, or legal acknowledgement, and coerced harm, as in rape or homicide.
In our conversation we discuss moral agency, the formative period of legal and theological traditions, conventional presumptions about these legal and theological schools, how tradition works, interpretive ambiguity within schools of thought, various instances of coercion, wrestling with the vast amount of hadith literature, and the fashioning of interpretive norms.
Contains readings for a version of an Introduction to Islam class I taught in Winter quarter of 2... more Contains readings for a version of an Introduction to Islam class I taught in Winter quarter of 2020 at UC Davis. Also has some assignments and reading directions.
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Through a comparative and historical examination of these ethical problems, the book demonstrates the usefulness of a new model for analyzing ethical thought produced by intellectuals working within traditions in a competitive pluralistic environment. The book compares classical Muslim thought on coercion with that of modern Western thinkers on these issues and finds significant parallels between them. The finding suggests that a fruitful starting point for comparative ethical inquiry, especially inquiry aimed at the discovery of common ground for ethical action, may be found in an examination of how ethicists from different traditions considered concrete problems.
Through a comparative and historical examination of these ethical problems, the book demonstrates the usefulness of a new model for analyzing ethical thought produced by intellectuals working within traditions in a competitive pluralistic environment. The book compares classical Muslim thought on coercion with that of modern Western thinkers on these issues and finds significant parallels between them. The finding suggests that a fruitful starting point for comparative ethical inquiry, especially inquiry aimed at the discovery of common ground for ethical action, may be found in an examination of how ethicists from different traditions considered concrete problems.
discover its effect on the distribution of responsibility between coerced and coercer. For example, what if the threat was amputation? What if the threat was imprisonment? What if the coercer gave the coerced a choice between raping or killing a bystander? What if the coercer gave the coerced a choice between killing one of two people? What if the coercer made no explicit threat? What if the coercer threatened the coerced’s life and demanded he cut-off an innocent bystander’s finger? Medieval authors manipulated the facts of the case to explore its implications on the normative rule and the distribution of responsibilities between the agents involved. By doing so, I argue that they were testing the limits and interaction of moral principles that tugged the distribution of responsibilities in conflicting directions. Many legal presumptions and principles came into conflict in coerced bodily harm jurisprudence. Examples of such are: the principle of the equality of protection from all harm, the presumption that the physical author of a crime ought to be held responsible, the coercer’s empirical role in forcing the coerced’s act. They were doing what jurists in legal systems have always done: ethical deliberation by balancing conflicting values to arrive at a just solution. I will conclude the paper by comparing the types of reasons offered in medieval legal discourse on the problem of coercion and murder with positions taken and justifications offered in Anglo-American thought. One conclusion of my inquiry is that cross-cultural comparative investigation of ethical thought can successfully reveal competing values, not rooted in the contingent circumstances of a given author’s context, that structure a given ethical problem.
In our conversation we discuss moral agency, the formative period of legal and theological traditions, conventional presumptions about these legal and theological schools, how tradition works, interpretive ambiguity within schools of thought, various instances of coercion, wrestling with the vast amount of hadith literature, and the fashioning of interpretive norms.