The Golden Rule, Metalaw, and the Maqasid al Shari'a: Toward a Paradigmatic Revolution

by Dr. Robert D. Crane

The history of humanity is one of expanding our horizons on earth as we bump into others like ourselves. As we “bump into” sentient beings from foreign planets, perhaps the shock will help us overcome our religious tribalism so that in awe we can in the future expand our vision beyond our own physical home and also to higher dimensions of reality.

We might even reverse the Golden Rule, which is enshrined in all of the world religions. Contextually designed for earthbound humans, it now reads, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”. Under the new moral guidelines of a still higher metalaw, the Golden Rule might read, “Do unto others as they would have done unto themselves”. Any other approach might destroy all life. This is the core of metalaw, which could provide the guidelines for new disciplines in the study of peace, prosperity, and freedom through compassionate justice both on earth and throughout the universe.

Islamic scholars centuries ago developed this metalegal perspective in what is known as the maqasid al shari’a, which is the science of ultimate ends. This is based on the common purpose of all sentient beings and even of every plant and animal in its own way, which, in turn, is based on study of their common origins.

In the Qur’an, Surah al Rahman 55:6, we read, wa najmu wa al shejaru yasujdan, “and the stars and the trees bow down to God”, but in ways you do not understand. As developed in my book, Rehabilitating the Role of Religion in the World, in the section on the shari’i principle or maqsad of haqq al mahid (environmental justice), this is developed further by reference to Surah al Nur 24:31: “Are you not aware that it is God whose limitless glory all [creatures] that are in the heavens and on earth extol, even the birds as they spread out their wings? Each [of them] knows how to pray unto Him and to glorify Him. And God has full knowledge of all that they do, for God’s is the dominion over the heavens and the earth, and with God is all journey’s end”. Allah tells us in Surah al ‘Isra 17:43-44, “And there is not a single thing but extols His limitless glory and praise. But you [O humans] fail to grasp the manner of glorifying Him”. The Qur’an summarizes all this in the simple phrase, “Wherever you turn, there is the face of God.”

The Qur’an speaks of an inner truth in Creation. Thus, in Surah al Hijr 15:85 we read: wa ma halaqna al samawat wa al ‘ard wa bainahum ille bil haqq, “and We have created the heavens and the earth and all that lives in between with an inner truth”. This is repeated again and again in different contexts, in Surah Yunus 10:5, Ali-i Imran 3:191, Hajj 22:18, and Sad 38:27, where the term batilan is used and best translated as “meaning and purpose”.

Introducing Surah al Hijr 15:85 is 15:75, which reads ina fi dhalika l’ayatin li al mutawasimin. “In this are messages for those who can read the signs”. The root word wasama in its fifth form tawasama means to watch or examine closely. Both of the classical commentators Razi and Zamakshari say that mutawasim means “one who applies the mind to the study of the outward appearances of a thing with a view to understanding its real nature and its inner characteristics”.

The Maqasid al Shari’ah

This search for the inner or higher truth of reality is the highest purpose of the maqasid al shari’ah as meta-legal guidelines for human responsibilities and rights, in accordance with the basic Qur’anic principle expressed in Surah al An’am 6:115: tama’at kalimatu rabika sidqan wa ‘adlan, “The Word of your Lord is fulfilled and perfected in truth and in justice”.

The theory is simple. All the revealed religions contain a universal paradigm of thought. Muslims call this Islam. It is based on an affirmation that there is an ultimate reality of which man and the entire universe are merely an expression, that therefore every person is created with an innate awareness of absolute truth and love, and that persons in community can and should develop from the various sources of divine revelation, including natural law or the Sunnat Allah, a framework of moral law to secure peace, prosperity, and freedom.

What is this system? Using current phraseology, the answer is simple. It is justice. This is the core message that activists of every religion should put front and center.

Within the last two or three years for the first time in decades of fruitless political activism in America, Muslims have finally begun to revive the necessary guidance of classical Islam in the universal purposes (maqasid) or universal principles (kulliyat) or essentials (dururiyat) of the maqasid al shari’ah as the applied essence of Islam in the world and as the only winning paradigm for America and for Muslims in America or anywhere else in the world or in the universe.

The Great American Experiment was founded on it. The Constitution of the United States of America starts with a Preamble that declares the priorities of its purpose. This starts with the pursuit of a unity through justice, national defense, domestic order, prosperity, and freedom. Freedom comes last because it is the product of justice. Only through leadership in promoting the natural law of justice can Muslims help America recover its lost tradition and become what its founders envisioned, which is to be a moral model for all of humankind.

The Prophet Muhammad, salla Allahu ‘alayhi wa salam, strove to develop the believer’s conscience through adherence to principles and values, known as the Sunnat Allah or natural law. This became known later as the synergism of three sources, namely, Divine Revelation or haqq al yaqin, observation of the physical laws of the universe or ‘ain al yaqin, and human reason or ‘ilm al yaqin to understand the first two primary sources. The values and principles were just as important as their source. The Prophet and especially his follower ‘Ali, radi Allahu anhu, showed a way to transcend narrow and self-centered group allegiance in the tribalistic and negative form of asabiya in favor of primary loyalty to universal principles themselves.

These universal principles or maqasid were developed over a period of centuries into what became the world’s most sophisticated code of human responsibilities and rights. They are spelled out in three of my recent books. The first one is The Natural Law of Compassionate Justice: An Islamic Perspective, Read 1 Communications, 224 pages, released in January 2010. The second is a 560-page textbook, entitled Islam and Muslims: Key Current Challenges, The Center for Understanding Islam, February 2010, And the third, for release in the summer of 2010, is entitled Rehabilitating the Role of Religion in the World: Laying a New Foundation on the Natural Law of Compassionate Justice, which has a detailed discussion on the origin and historical development of the maqasid, as well as a lengthy chapter on each of the eight maqasid as I understand them. The most advanced study of Islamic normative law as an expression of Metalaw, however, is Professor Jasser Auda’s Maqasid al Shari’ah as Philosophy of Islamic Law: A Systems Approach, IIIT, 2008, 347 pages.

The first universal principle or maqsad is known as haqq al din. This requires respect for religion. At a secondary level, known as the hajjiyat, this maqsad means that religion should be neither prescribed nor proscribed in public life, that is, neither institutionalized nor forbidden. This hajja, as developed by the first great successor to Al Shatibi, namely, Mufti Ibn Ashur of Tunisia in 1946, is basic to every level of metalaw.

The next universal principle, haqq al nafs, requires respect for the individual person. At the secondary level it requires respect for sentient life. At the still more detailed level, known as tahsinniyat, it teaches the limiting principles of the just war doctrine.

The next maqsad requires respect for the community, haqq al nasl, which is sacred because its component members derive their individual sovereignty directly from God. This is the other side or dimension of asabiya, which Ibn Khaldun distinguished from the negative form known as tribalism. This positive form of community loyalty permits authority and sovereignty to ascend from God through the human person upwards from the nuclear family to every higher level of community, including the nation and even all of humankind. This sacred form of sovereignty is the opposite of the positivist concept enshrined in Western international law as we were taught it at Harvard Law School. The Islamic concept of sovereignty turns the Western secular concept of the state on its head, because Western secularist jurisprudence declares that ultimate authority comes not from God but from whoever can impose order by force over fifty-one percent of any given territory. For example, this Islamic concept declares that the Palestinian people are inherently a sovereign nation, whereas Western international law declares that they do not exist.

The fourth maqsad, which has always been assumed but rarely spelled out as an irreducible principle of the Sunnat Allah is haqq al mahid (from wahada) or respect for the physical environment.

These first four of eight maqasid al shari’ah are what I call the transcendent or guiding principles. These are followed by four implementing maqasid.

Briefly, the first of the four is haqq al hurriyah, which requires governmental institutions adequate to promote the self-determination of persons, communities, and nations, based on the four hajjiyat known as khilafa, shurah, ijma, and an independent judiciary. This concept of political freedom is basic to the founding concept of government introduced in the West by the American Revolution, which in turn was based on the Scottish Renaissance.

All of America’s founders condemned democracy as the worst possible form of government, because by definition democracy, as exhibited in the French Revolution, vested ultimate authority not in God but in whoever could manipulate the masses to support elitist oppression. The opposite of a democracy is a republic, which by definition is based on the concept that the legislature is charged with seeking and implementing justice from the higher authority of God, that the Executive branch of government is charged with carrying out the will of the legislature, and that the Judicial branch of government is responsible to assure that both of the other branches are properly doing their job. In 1787, at the Constitutional Convention, when Benjamin Franklin was asked whether the Framers of the Constitution had created a republic or a monarchy, he replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.”

The second of the four applied maqasid is haqq al mal or economic justice. This requires respect for the decentralization of power through institutional reform, especially in the creation of money and credit designed to promote the universal right of access to individual ownership of wealth producing assets. This diffusion of capital ownership, while respecting the property rights of all existing owners, is key to reducing the growing wealth gap within and among nations, which is the primary cause of radicalism and has always been the primary cause of civilizational suicide.

The final set of maqasid requires respect for human dignity (haqq al karama), especially through gender equity, and respect for knowledge (haqq al ‘ilm or ‘aql) through freedom of thought, speech, and assembly.

These eight universal principles and purposes of sentient life are the key to the rise and fall of civilizations. Civilizations fall, usually in the midst of wars, when pessimists see growing inequities and fail to respond as agents of change or when they seek change through blind destruction. Both individual persons and entire civilizations die when they abandon the transcendent mission implanted in human nature and seek only to survive. Civilizations rise when optimists follow a higher vision and challenge the status quo by perfecting what is good but can be better. As brought out in my book Shaping the Future: Challenge and Response, Tapestry Press, 1997, 159 pages, it is a matter of challenge and response.

Unfortunately, most nations in our world have became at best bi-polar societies which alternate between seeking justice and seeking physical power as ultimate ends, without appreciation for the fact that the pursuit of justice is the most reliable road to security and peace. The goal should not be to empower only oneself but to empower others. Any perspective that raises an ideology of power, whether economic, political or military, to the level of an ultimate end and rejects justice as a guiding paradigm in either domestic or foreign policy inevitably will lead from cosmos to chaos.

The key to justice and to just governance, on earth or anywhere else, is education. Education should be designed to shape the paradigms of thought that govern public life. The paradigm shapers control the agendas as developed by think-tanks and the media. It is a truism, not absorbed by Muslim think-tanks, that whoever controls the policy agenda controls policy.

Thomas Jefferson, who drafted America’s Declaration of Independence and was its third president, taught that people can remain free only if they are properly educated, that education consists primarily in learning virtue, and that no people can be virtuous unless both their private and public lives are infused with awareness and love of God. In his days, the virtues were other words for what today are known as human responsibilities and rights, and these were considered together as the very definition of justice.

God, through his mercy, has given every person, as well as every nation, the freedom to become what they are intended to be. Their true identity is not what they may falsely try to construct, but rather what they in potential have been created to be. One’s purpose, both as a person and as a community, therefore is to become what one is, metaphorically speaking, in the eyes of God.

This search for the inner or higher truth of reality is the highest purpose of the maqasid al shari’ah as metalegal guidelines for responsibilities and rights, in accordance with the basic Qur’anic principle expressed in Surah al An’am 6:115: tama’at kalimatu rabika sidqan wa ‘adlan, “The Word of your Lord is fulfilled and perfected in truth and in justice.”

The motivation for seeking to become what God has created one to be is best expressed in one of the fondest prayers of the Prophet Muhammad, salla allahu ‘alayhi wa salam: Allahhuma, asaluka hubbaka, wa hubba man yuhibbuka, as hubba kulli ‘amali yuqaribuni ila hubbika, “O Allah, I ask you for Your love, and for the love of everyone who loves You, and for the love of everything that will bring me closer to Your love”.