Natural Law Theory: Qurʾānic Covenant Revisited
Divine Covenant - Science and Concepts of Natural Law in the Qur’an and Islamic Disciplines - Ulrika Mårtensson
Ulrika Mårtensson [+ ]
The Norwegian University of Science and Technology
View Website
Ulrika Mårtensson is Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at The Norwegian University of Science and Technology. She researches early Islamic history and historiography, focusing on how religious symbols express social contract theories and legal-economic issues. She is also doing research on the Qur'an, employing both historical and exegetical-legal perspectives and comparing early Islamic approaches to the Qur'an with contemporary research. Other research interests concern Islam as it is developing in the institutional contexts and public spheres of the Nordic welfare states; and 'political Islam'.
Description
Chapter 4 proceeds to analyse the concept with reference to current research, and to other theoretical paradigms than those treated in the previous chapter. Here I show how certain strands within research align with some early and medieval exegetes in conceptualising the Qurʾān in terms of natural law theory. For these exegetes, the practical implication of this kind of theory is a law based on rights. For the aim of this study, this means that in so far as scientific knowledge and observation produced discursively within the Islamic disciplines refer to Qurʾānic knowledge, it includes the practical matter of the law and to what extent it protects rights.