Natural Law and Natural Rights in Islamic Law

Abstract

This article provides an initial point of departure for considering the scope to which Islamic legal theory sources (i.e. usul al-fiqh) countenanced a theory of reason's ontological authority that can be framed in terms of natural law. Tracing two main schools of thought, the Hard and Soft Natural Law approaches, the article shows that despite starting from competing theological positions, adherents of both schools developed a jurisprudence that nonetheless granted them ontological authority to direct their reason to the business of law and legal regulation. That authority, according to the two historical schools of natural law, was premised upon a fusion of fact and value in the natural world, thereby investing it with both empirical and normative content from which a reasoned deduction could assume normative force.