Time and Moral Choice in Islamic Jurisprudence

Understanding how classical jurists thought about time is essential for us to fully understand the nature of legal demands, responsibility, and choice in the Islamic legal tradition. Despite its importance, the idea of time in Islamic legal thought remains largely unexplored, although there has been some interest in the concept of time in Islamic philosophy and philosophical theology. The Islamic legal tradition is profoundly concerned with time and advanced its own set of reflections on time. Islamic jurisprudents, I argue in this paper, understood time in moral terms, not as a neutral container or mere background action, but as a series of opportunities in which the authority of divine revelation and human moral reasoning are articulated. That is not to say that they did not understand time to contain action, which, we will see below, is an understanding that is reflected in the thought of some jurisprudents more clearly than others, but that time was not a neutral linear progression from past to present into the future. It is rather a series of differently conceptualized moral opportunities that attached to and informed human action in response to the demands placed on it by divine revelation. A critical question that classical jurisprudents did debate was how we undertake our duties when divine commands give only general guidelines in relation to time or no time-specific determinations at all. Does a mere divine command evoke a necessity for immediate performance (ʿalā l-fawr), or is there a moral justification for a relaxed or postponed performance (ʿalā l-tarākhī)? Implicit within these questions, I contend, is a concern for how divine speech, mediated by the work of jurisprudents, should be seen to interfere with and order human time in their life on earth.