This entry belongs to Shahrur’s glossary. For Shahrur, analogical reasoning is not merely a technical jurisprudential tool, but an example of a mode of thought that reduces the new to a prior original instead of understanding it within its context, knowledge, and reality.
Meaning in Shahrur
Analogical reasoning appears in the atlas as a tool with limits. It may be useful for organizing similarities within a narrow field, but it becomes an obstacle when it turns into a general method that repeats the past, or when it is transferred from jurisprudence to narratives, history, and knowledge.
Its function in the critique
- It reduces the new question to a prior original.
- It weakens the possibility of contemporary independent reasoning if it becomes a final standard.
- It confuses domains when applied to Qur’anic narrative or history as though they were legal-texts.
- It reveals the tendency of Salafi reading to fix the past as an original on which the present is measured.
Foundational links
- Analogical reasoning reduces the new to the original
- Analogical reasoning is not valid in historical narrative
- Jurisprudential analogical reasoning does not extend to narrative
- Jurisprudential analogical reasoning does not extend to Qur’anic narrative
- Usul al-fiqh and the critique of inherited jurisprudence
Limits of the reading
The critique of analogical reasoning here does not mean denying every rational comparison. The point is to reject turning analogical reasoning into an authority that returns every new thing to an old original, or transfers the method of jurisprudence to domains that cannot bear it.