Peculiarities of interpretation in the Islamic legal family

Abstract

In this article, the author examines the issue related to the peculiarities of interpretation in the Muslim legal family. The author notes that there is no term in the Islamic legal doctrine that would be completely identical to the concept of «interpretation of law». The closest term in meaning is «ijtihad», the meaning of which can be defined as the activity of a Muslim jurist to resolve religious and legal issues in the absence of an unambiguous answer in the main sources of Islamic law - the Koran and the Sunnah of the Prophet Muhammad. At the same time, the concept of Ijtihad is broader than the concept of interpretation of law, but interpretation is fully covered by Ijtihad. The author comes to the conclusion that the main characteristic features of interpretation in Muslim law are a special subject composition of interpreters, to whom a number of requirements are imposed (detailed knowledge of the provisions of the Koran and the Sunnah of the Prophet Muhammad; a high level of proficiency in Arabic; knowledge of the theory of cancellation; knowledge and ability to apply methods of deriving legal norms from primary sources; knowledge of issues on which authoritative Muslim scholars have agreement), a wide range of methods (qiyas, istislah, istishab, az-zarayi, istikhsan, etc.) and methods of interpretation (grammatical, logical, historical, systematic), a special sequence of actions in the process of interpretation, as well as attitude to the result of interpretation as to probabilistic rather than absolute knowledge.