91 The Codification of Islamic Juridical Principles

7. Juridical guarantee of enforcement in the case of a breach or violation of the law.

As an objective study would well ascertain, all these elements are found in the Islamic legal system. By no means a collection of inconsistent and scattered rules formulated according to the circumstances of specific individuals or groups, the Islamic legal system represents a coherent and consistent body of law thoroughly based on general norms and principles, and expressed in laws and legal judgments which generally reflect the particular application and specific cases of those basic and essential norms.

Students of the methodology of the Islamic legal system are well aware that in this system the coherence and constancy of the juridical standards, from which particular regulations derive, are maintained to such a degree that if a jurist, for example, comes to believe that in a certain case he has a civic responsibility, he is automatically obliged to apply the same opinion to any number of other comparable cases, and a different ruling in similar cases, in fact, would reflect a lack of knowledge of juridical standards.

The above statements clearly demonstrate the significance of juridical codes and its place in the history of Islamic legal studies. The existence of a body of general norms and principles whereby the jurist can infer the corollaries and by way of comparing them with particular instances and cases, form decisions regarding current events, is, in fact, a mark of the dynamic nature of the Islamic legal system.

It is true that Muslim jurists, from the very beginning, made some attempts to introduce the general norms and principles of Islamic law. By this, however, we do not mean to imply that Islam, in itself, lacks a system, and that the principles of Islamic law were wholly formulated by Muslim jurists. In fact, there are two kinds of principles in Islamic law; one taken entirely from the Qur'ān and the Sunnah, e.g. the rule of lā ḍarar, the rule of yad and the rule of taslīṭ. The other category of princi-