ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on hermeneutical mechanisms progressive Muslim scholars have devised in search of the ethical imperative in Islamic jurisprudence in order to address the conflicts. It highlights two important hermeneutical mechanisms progressive Muslim scholars take recourse to in order to discover or recover the ethical in Islamic ethics and jurisprudence. These include the term comprehensive contextualization and teleological Qur'an-Sunna hermeneutics. In this regard, the chapter provides the scholarship of two progressive Muslim scholars, Hashim Kamali and Abullah Saeed. The chapter discusses the interpretational implications of traditional Islam's subscription to the salafi worldview in terms of its epistemology. This aspect of traditional Islamic hermeneutics has important implications in terms of its ability to incorporate ethical values. There are other aspects of classical Islamic hermeneutics that were prevalent in classical Islam which also contributed to the same ethical arrest phenomenon. The chapter describes the main delineating features of Saeed's contextualist approach.