The Maqāṣid and Their Naqāʾiḍ: A Hierarchical Ordering of the Objectives of the Sharīʿa and Their Anti-Values

Abstract

Abstract

Scholarship on maqāṣid al-sharīʿa has produced multiple systems of categorization: by level of necessity, by scope of application, by the polarity of benefit and harm, and by the identification of core ethical principles the Sharīʿa embodies. Treating values such as justice as standalone objectives alongside the five necessities leaves the relationships among different types of objectives unclear, and the tradition’s account of what the law prevents has never received the systematic naming its account of what the law protects received in the ḥifẓ formulae. This article proposes a Three-Layer Maqāṣid Framework that organizes established principles into a hierarchy ordered by abstraction and ethical function. Layer 1 comprises the universal aims of procuring benefit and repelling harm; Layer 2 comprises the five necessities as inductively derived protections; Layer 3 comprises textually explicit Value/Anti-Value dyads, among them ʿadl and ẓulm, which operate as the evaluative criterion presupposed by al-Shāṭibī’s inductive method. Drawing on al-Raysūnī’s distinction between kulliyyāt naṣṣiyya and kulliyyāt istiqrāʾiyya and on Toshihiko Izutsu’s semantic analysis of Qur’anic ethical concepts, the article introduces the term Anti-Maqāṣid (naqāʾiḍ al-sharīʿa) to enunciate the counter-objectives that classical jurisprudence derived and reasoned with without assembling into a named stratum. The framework proposes no new objectives of the Sharīʿa; it clarifies the function of established ones, the order of their derivation, and supplies the anti-value pole that the received taxonomy leaves undeveloped.