ABSTRACT
This chapter provides the ways in which revelation and divine injunctions have been conceived and implemented by Muslim scholars, who sought to establish norms for deciding the right action and conduct. It investigates the meaning and the implications of divine command theory associated, in the Islamic tradition, with the Ashʿarite school of theology. Divine command ethics rests on the assumption that the foundations of morality are divine commands that are usually expressed in the imperative form of speech in a religious text. Divine Command Theory is not an Islamic theory to start with, it is a theory that was named and propagated in other religious traditions, and is popular among the philosophers who call themselves divine command theorists and who mainly belong to the Protestant branch of Christianity. Contemporary divine command theorists are attempting to construct theories that would avoid these implications, thus their theories are sometimes called ‘modified Divine Command Theories’.
