Regrounding Maqasid Al-Shari'ah: The Qur’anic Semantics and Foundation of Human Common Good

Author: Mohamed El-Tahir El-Mesawi
Publisher: Islamic Book Trust 
ISBN: 9789670526973
Weight: 
Pages: 259pp
Year: 2022
Price: RM60

This book is an original attempt to open up and widen the foundational textual sources of the idea of Maqasid by way of bringing in related and relevant Qur’anic terms that the scholars of the Maqasid have presumably overlooked. Once these Qur’anic terms are adequately identified and analysed, they would become the base on which the Maqasid could be regrounded. To achieve this, the authors have employed a semantic-conceptual analysis approach, which is unavoidably linguistic and abstract. Their unmistakable goal, however, is to develop a new and deeper perspective that leads to a better understanding of religion and reality.

The authors have succeeded to balance the Qur’anic semantic fields of the category of the five necessities (i.e., din, nafs, nasl, ‘aql and mal) with an adequate Qur’anic understanding of the concept of being. Avoiding the pitfall of confining ethical discourse to language alone, the authors made sure to demonstrate and emphasize the interconnectedness among being, language and universal values. In so doing, their work paves the way for a new sensibility and a wider intellectual and methodological horizon in both Qur’anic and Maqasid studies.