Before Revelation: The Boundaries of Muslim Moral Thought.

• Author: Weiss, Bernard
• Position: Review

By KEVIN A. REINHART. SUNY Series in Middle Eastern Studies. Albany: STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS, 1995. Pp. xi + 255. $16.95 (paper).

Among the problems (masa il) that constitute the standard agenda of the Muslim discipline of usul al-fiqh is that of "acts occurring before the coming of revelation." As Reinhart's book astutely demonstrates, there was more to this controversy than might meet the eye - at least at first glance. Reinhart links this problem with three other problems that he sees as closely related (whether "permitted" is an extrarevelational or revelational category, whether acts are intrinsically good or detestable and can be known to be such apart from revelation, and whether thanking the benefactor is an obligation knowable apart from revelation) and lumps the four together under the label "the before revelation complex." He argues that, like many problems dealt with in the Muslim religious sciences, the problems forming this complex were tools or means with which to ponder deeper issues.

The deeper issue in this case is the scope of revelation's authority over the moral life. Reinhart distinguishes two different positions among Muslim thinkers on this issue, which he calls the "high view" and the "low view" of revelation. The high view makes revelation the exclusive basis of the moral life. Valid assessments of acts as good or detestable and as obligatory, proscribed or permitted are found in revelation and nowhere else. ("Revelation" in this context refers to what is commonly called, in Christian theology, special revelation - scriptural revelation, revelation mediated by prophets - as opposed to natural revelation.) The low view of revelation accords validity to moral assessments which the human aql (usually translated as "reason" but retained by Reinhart in its Arabic form because of its multiple meanings in the literature under investigation) makes on its own apart from revelation. Revelation, in this view, has a supplementary role: it functions as warner, exhorter, supplier of detail, and stipulator of ritual requirements. This is not to say that the low view undermines God's role in the moral life. Since the aql is God's creation, moral assessments known by the aql are as much God's as man's.

Of the four parts into which the book is divided, parts II and IV take up the lion's share of space and are the most substantive. Part II is an overview of the three positions found among Muslims on the human situation...