Paper's abstract

Roger Arnaldez, Muslim Law in the Light of Koranic sciences
Islam calls "Law" any revelation. In the legal meaning of the word, it concerns prescriptions of all orders, revealed through an Envoy (Rasûl) and, in this particular sense, the Koran essentially entails three laws: that of Moses, that of Jesus and that of Muhammad. The first two were "abrogated", the Koranic law is the only one and it will last until the end of times.@But what is precisely this law, in the legal sense of the word, into which Muslims seem to look for the solution to every problem? In fact, the Koran contains only a very limited number of specifically legal verses. Lawyers (fuquahâ') developed a whole right, by founding themselves on the resources of commentaries, on prophetic traditions, on certain reasoning methods, such as analogy. In fact, the specialists of the "principles of law" (the usûliyyûn) merely adapted to Islam the rules of law they borrowed to non-moslem systems (roman-byzantine, persian, or even rabbinic laws). To be convinced of this point, it is enough to compare the many titles of the questions dealt with by the works of the great lawyers, to the meager data given by the Koran and the tradition, regarding vocabulary as well as the core of the matter. Therefore, this very process of islamisation allowed the Muslim fiqh to constitute itself a past and nowadays, to develop. It seems it is to remain the only one really useful and effective. One may ask how the Islamists, wishing to refer only to Koranic and prophetic data, could legislate for a modern State and solve, by their sole use, without more or less concealed borrowings, all the very complex issues to which our societies are confronted today.

Key Words : religion, islam, coran, muslim
t. 38, 1993 : p. 83-91

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