Muhammad al-Mawardi: “On Qadis”

Impact

Al-Mawardi’s Ordinances of Government was the first political study to focus on individual institutions and their functions within an Islamic state. Previous studies of Islamic law, as well as numerous later ones, organized their texts by the school of Islamic law. Al-Mawardi instead opted to structure his text by function and, within each function, to provide examples from the four Sunni schools of law. For example, the Ordinances has sections on the appointment of sovereigns, on amputation as a punishment for theft, and—as discussed here—on the appointment of qadis. Some later theological texts follow al-Mawardi’s function-based format, but most continue to focus on the positions of one particular school of thought rather than comparing the positions of the four schools.

There is another text of the same title, written by Abu Yala Muhammad ibn al-Husayn al-Farra (d. 1066), and there are questions as to which text was written first. However, since al-Mawardi’s work provides few examples from the Hanbali school and Abu Yala’s provides mostly Hanbali examples, it is reasonable to assume that Abu Yala, a Hanbali scholar, wrote his as a reaction to al-Mawardi’s.

The Ordinances of Government has proved to be an immensely popular and influential text, one that is still referred to in the twenty-first century. It is a key text for the modern movement called Hizb ut-Tahrir, typically translated as “Party of Liberation.” This is a pan-Islamist movement founded in Jerusalem in 1953. Its goal is to unite all Islamic countries into a single political entity ruled by Islamic law. Essentially, it wants to restore the caliphate under an elected Muslim leader. In recent years this organization has been the target of controversy. Those who are suspicious of the organization accuse it of anti-Semitism and support of terrorism, despite its claimed renunciation of violence. Its supporters argue that the group is misunderstood and unfairly accused of preaching hatred and violence. Whichever point of view is correct, the group wants to return to classical Islamic processes and structures, and they find those processes and structures outlined in the Ordinances of Government.