Lecture 3: Legal Causes, Customary Causation, and Rational Judgments

This lecture completes the basic map of hukm (حكم), “judgment” or “ruling,” by explaining how the Lawgiver connects legal duties to signs in the world. In hukm wad'i (حكم وضعي), the Sacred Law places markers that tell us when a legal ruling becomes active or valid. A sabab (سبب), legal cause, brings a ruling into effect, such as the sun passing the zenith making Dhuhr obligatory. A shart (شرط), condition, must be present for the act to be valid or effective, such as wudu for prayer, but it does not itself make the prayer obligatory. A mani' (مانع), preventative, blocks a ruling even when other elements are present, such as menstruation preventing the obligation of prayer.

The lesson then turns to hukm adi (حكم عادي), customary or empirical judgment. This is the kind of judgment we learn from repeated observation: eating is followed by fullness, not eating is followed by hunger, dropping a cup is followed by falling. These are real patterns in Allah’s created world, and we must live responsibly according to them. But they are not rational necessities. In Ash'ari kalam, created things do not independently create their effects; rather, Allah creates both the usual cause and the usual effect together according to His custom, or adah (عادة).

This distinction is crucial for understanding miracles and for avoiding a purely naturalistic worldview. Fire normally burns, but it did not burn Ibrahim, peace be upon him, because Allah commanded it to be cool and safe. Musa, peace be upon him, struck the sea and it split, not because a stick naturally splits seas, but because Allah created that extraordinary event. Such cases are a kharq fi al-adah (خرق في العادة), a break in the customary pattern. The instructor contrasts this with philosophical views that treat causal connections as necessary and therefore tend to reinterpret miracles naturalistically.

The third kind of ruling is hukm aqli (حكم عقلي), rational judgment. Unlike empirical judgments, rational judgments do not depend on repeated observation; unlike legal judgments, they do not depend on stipulation by an authority. They are known by the intellect itself. The three rational judgments are wajib (واجب), necessary; mustahil (مستحيل), impossible; and ja'iz (جائز), possible. A thing is rationally necessary if denying it entails contradiction, impossible if affirming it entails contradiction, and possible if neither affirming nor denying it entails contradiction.

These rational judgments can be known either daruri (ضروري), non-inferentially or self-evidently, or nazari (نظري), through reflection and proof. For example, “one plus one equals two” is known without needing experiments. By contrast, proving Allah’s eternity is nazari because it requires reasoning from the fact that if Allah had a beginning, He would be like originated things and would not be God. The instructor emphasizes that mastering these categories is not a technical luxury: it protects the mind from confusing scientific regularities with metaphysical necessities.

The lecture closes by opening the second premise: the question of divine action and human action. Three positions are introduced. The Jabriyya say that God creates all actions with no meaningful relation to human choice, which collapses moral responsibility. The Qadariyya say that human beings create their own actions, either directly or by a power God gave them, which compromises Allah’s exclusive creative power. The position of Ahl al-Sunna is that Allah alone creates all acts, while human beings have choice and acquire their acts through kasb (كسب), acquisition. Thus humans are responsible without being creators.