Ḥadīth -Based Ethics : Ḥadīth as a Scholarly Sub-discipline of Islamic Ethics

Of the prominent scholars who disregarded the role of ḥadīth in Islamic ethics (akhlāq) is Bernard Carra de Vaux (d. 1953), who, in 1913, wrote the entry on “akhlāq” in the first edition of The Encyclopaedia of Islam. In this entry, de Vaux adopted a limited understanding of Islamic ethics that was confined to the Greek philosophical tradition and argued that “the doctrine of the akhlāq is nothing but the ethics of the peripatetic philosophy” where “the science of moral philosophy … has an existence of its own; it is not an extract from different literary works, it is a science which is in fact connected with the tradition of Greek philosophy” (de Vaux 1987, 231). He thus concluded that “the Muslim authors who have written in a methodical manner about moral philosophy are comparatively few” (de Vaux 1987, 233).

Nine decades later, Muḥammad ʿĀbid al-Jābirī (d. 2010) also adopted a narrow conception of ethics in his al-ʿAql al-Akhlāqī l-ʿArabī (“The Arabic Moral Reason”), a large work in which he attempted to present a history of ethics in Islamic civilisation. However, al-Jābirī’s work neglected specific contributions, most importantly Qurʾānic ethics, although he did reference the work of Muḥammad ʿAbd Allāh Drāz (d. 1958), The Moral World of the Qurʾān, but he undermined its value and contribution. Likewise, despite acknowledging that “the ḥadīth on ethics were countless,” al-Jābirī downplayed the contribution of the akhlāq corpus to ethics on grounds of differentiating between advocating and living (ʿamal) by the values of the Qurʾān and ḥadīth, on the one hand, and engaging in scholarly writing (taʾlīf ʿilmī) on Islamic values on the other. In other words, al-Jābirī restricted his historicisation to the theoretical works (kalām) on ethics and excluded the lived experience (mumārasa) of Muslim communities throughout history. In addition, he only included systematic works (kitāba munaẓẓama) which formulated a theoretical argument that follows scholarly methods (i.e., works that make use of typologies, analyses, and construction) (al-Jābirī 2001, 535, 537). Al-Jābirī also undermined the contribution of the fuqahāʾ to ethics, where he classified their work under al-ādāb al-sharʿiyya, by which he denotes “the best manner (al-ṭarīqa al-fuḍlā) to perform what is obligatory or recommended” and is thus “a formality (shakliyya) that is lacking in ethical content.” To al-Jābirī, the work of the fuqahāʾ was enriched by the work of Sufis on ādāb al-sulūk, which address the etiquette of spiritual wayfaring, even though the Sufi contribution to al-ādāb al-sharʿiyya continued to be complementary to fiqh. These ādāb sharʿiyya entrenched “in the minds (nufūs) of the fuqahāʾ, muḥaddithūn (traditionists, sing. muḥaddith), and mutakallimūn the certainty that the sciences of religion (ʿulūm al-dīn) and akhlāq are one and the same” (al-Jābirī 2001, 536).

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Published in: Ḥadīth and Ethics through the Lens of Interdisciplinarity
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
See chapter on publisher's website: https://dx.doi.org/10.1163/9789004525931_003