Introduction

Abstract

Early Muslim scholars — particularly those of the Abbassid period — have bequeathed to us a number of works on Muslim international law based fundamentally on the idea of universalism and that a religious war of aggression is one of the tenets of Islam prescribed by the Qur’ān for securing conversions or exacting tribute. Actually, such views were intended by their authors to facilitate the application of the principles of the Shari’ah to specific questions. Naturally, their approach was dictated by the existing environmental socio-political requirements and conditions of the time. Therefore, their rulings cannot be considered as unconditionally applicable to the needs of the Islamic state in the twentieth century irrespective of contemporary socio-political exigences. Nevertheless, as time elapsed, those ideas gained in the public mind a kind of sacrosanct soundness of their own and came to be regarded by the majority of Muslims as an inherent part of the Shari’ah itself, although neither the Qur’ān nor the traditions offer the remotest authority for such an unwarranted enlargement of the Shari’ah. On the contrary, the Law-Giver deliberately provided a limited range of explicit ordinances to determine the general legal pattern within which society ought to develop; leaving the multitude of possible legal problems to be decided according to the changing requirements of time and society. Thus, it is not accurate to include the doctrines of the various Islamic schools of thought in the Shari’ah stricto sensu. These schools, in fact, represent different processes of speculation on what the divine law, the Shari’ah, might be. They are the media of making the Shari’ah accessible to common believers.