Who reads, who writes? Who unties this knot?

Life is by nature hard. At every moment it puts a thousand and one kinds of knots before us. Who will read these knots, who will write them, and who will untie them? Who evaluates the time in which we are living, who decides what the rulings suited to this time are, who takes up as a problem the problems this brings about? That is the real question.

Reconciling life with our principles, determining an attitude consistent with our principles in the events we encounter, is not as easy a task as is supposed. It requires intelligence, discernment, insight and, more importantly, a high degree of sincerity.

Sincerity: toward God, His Messenger, the Book and the believers.

In fact, to judge the applicability of a rule established for one event to another event is always a matter of interpretation, adaptation, decision. To apply later to other, similar events a rule that was established and expressed for a certain period or on the occasion of a particular event is not always as easy a task as is supposed.

Sometimes, while saying let us adhere to the letter of the principle, we may have strayed from its purpose, even harmed the purpose. That is why knowing the lawgiver's purpose and intention is very important for understanding whether that rule is valid in the place where we later apply it.

Three famous practices attributed to Hz. Umar have been a guide, for those who have exercised ijtihad in this field for centuries, on how important it is not to lose the relationship between rule and purpose.

One is his suspension of the requirement of the verse commanding that zakat be given to the mu'allafa al-qulub, that is, to those whose hearts are to be warmed to Islam, on the grounds that the conditions of its revelation no longer existed and that it had become a serious door to abuse. This of course did not mean the eternal abrogation of the ruling. It was only a matter of seeing that applying that ruling exactly as it was under the conditions of that day would not realize the purpose of the ruling, and suspending it so as to apply it again if the same conditions recurred. Indeed, outside those special conditions that verse continued to be applied throughout Islamic history.

In the second case, it is reported that Hz. Umar did the same by suspending the ruling that Muslim men may marry women from among the People of the Book. The reason was that, as a result of the conquests, because of the growing preference of Muslim Arabs for white Christian women, situations arose in which Arab women could not marry. Because of the danger of making forbidden what God has made lawful, this measure did not last very long. Muslims continued throughout history to marry women of the People of the Book.

The third case is the suspension, again by Hz. Umar, of the application of the hadd punishment commanding the cutting off of the hand of thieves. The reason for Hz. Umar was that in the case brought before him, a slave who had committed theft had not had his essential needs met by his master. Truly, this reason has been one of the most frequently invoked grounds for suspending a ruling throughout Islamic history. Throughout history the hadd punishments for theft have very rarely been applied, because in every period members of the Islamic judiciary, the qadis, took a critical stance of their own by placing the responsibility for this matter rather on the rulers.

This "maqasid" mind attributed to Hz. Umar became a path of ijtihad that takes into account the purposes and intentions behind the rulings. Imam al-Shatibi's 4-volume work called al-Muwafaqat, Maqasid al-Shari'a (The Purposes of the Shari'a, İz Yayınları) formulates this subject very well. This book grounds, in harmony with the fundamental principles of Islam, the extremely natural juristic balance that already exists between the change of times and the change of rulings (the change of ruling with the change of time). The most important principle observed here is "the social benefit of Muslims," that is, maslaha mursala.

But the flexibility and the path of ijtihad that this book assumes for the Shari'a have always been an appetizing path also for those who want to intervene in Islam from outside and force it into the mold they want. This book has been one of the most important reference sources of those who want to set Islam adrift in the course of historicity, together of course with Hz. Umar's well-known and famous ijtihads...

The Arabic edition of this book in my library is a copy printed by the foundation of Suzanne Mubarak, wife of Hosni Mubarak, who ruled Egypt as a dictator for 30 years and harbored no Islamic concern. What could Suzanne Mubarak be looking for in such a book?

The purpose in publishing this book is of course far from the purposes of al-Shatibi, or of Muslims, who seek above all maslaha mursala. What they are seeking is not really to know the purposes of the rulings sincerely and to fulfill what they require, but, by advancing along the path this idea opens, to make Islam entirely subject to whims and desires.

If there is a knot for Muslims, only Muslims who look after the benefit of Muslims can untie this knot, with the feeling and will of submission to God. In the effort of those who follow this feeling and will, there is both the possibility of hitting the mark and the possibility of error.

Since we're at it, let us end with the words of Aşık Veysel, which we have adapted, saying may his soul be at peace:

"Who would read, who would write / Who would untie this knot / The sheep would roam with the wolf / If opinions were not all different."