What is meant
The legal rulings here are not absolute and unconstrained; rather, they have fixed legislative limits that regulate the field of ijtihad. These limits include a minimum and a maximum, and between them understanding and application move.
The atom’s structure in the atlas
- Type of argument: legislative
- Movement of the argument: it makes legal rulings have limits that regulate ijtihad.
- Central terms: legal rulings, limits, ijtihad.
- Degree of centrality: primary.
This atom defines the field of legislative movement, preventing unrestricted absolutization and affirming that understanding and application move within the range of a minimum limit and a maximum limit.
Links to help with reading
- Muhammad Shahrur, The Book and the Qur’an
- Legislation, Limits, and Prohibition
- Abrogation does not occur within the Muhammadan message but pertains to the earlier messages
Basis
- Supporting text: “Limits: the legislative constants that define the scope of ijtihad, and include the minimum limit, the maximum limit, and others.”
Place of support in the book
- Book: The Book and the Qur’an.
- Location: in the middle section of the book
- Type of support: close evidence.
- Marker to aid verification: these are the straight lines
- Reading note: the phrase explicitly states the existence of an upper limit, a lower limit, and limits to movement in legislation, which is direct support for the atom.
Degree of documentation
- Level: directly documented
- Meaning of the level: the atom rests on an explicit witness close to the wording of the claim.
- Reading limits: the formulation above is an analytical summary and should not be treated as a verbatim quotation unless the witness is quoted verbatim.
Its function in the book
Its function here is definitional; it fixes a meaning or conceptual distinction that Shahrur relies on in building the idea.
Related to
Editorial note
It works together with the atom of limits as the foundation of the Sharia.