An Analysis of the Fundamental Elements of Legal Texts in the Light of the Views of Muslim Scholars

Consistency or inconsistency in the course of understanding texts and interpretation are one of the challenging issues in modern philosophy whose range covers legal discussions particularly the interpretation of legal texts by a judge. As per the Islamic school of thought which interprets legal texts on the pivot of the author or the text itself, the reader is seeking for the intended meaning of the author. Impressed by modern approach of the West, some modernist scholars have gone to hold that the customary method of understanding and interpretation fail to meet the needs of the new generation and the contemporary world. They have thus sought for modern thinking in legal texts and asked for new interpretation of the open texture of law according to the up-to-date demands. In what follows, the author has tried to analyze three key factors of positing the law in the light of Islamic thought: the author, the interpreter and the features of the legal texts. As per the celebrated Islamic thought and demands of legal divinity, the main law-maker is Allah Almighty and human institutes are given permission to make law only on some social affairs according to the faculty of reason. Contrary to the historical approach and hermeneutics that speak of open texture of legal texts, the interpreter of law seeks for the intended meaning by law-maker which is fixed and determined. Contrary to factual texts that express and describe outside realities, legal texts express the considerations of divine or human law-makers. Accordingly, the analysis of the essence of legal propositions, their subject predicate and judgment, matters the most. The method adapted for this research is descriptive-analytic.