From Forgiveness to Foreclosure: Waqf, Debt, and the Remaking of the Ḥanafī Legal Subject in Late Ottoman Mount Lebanon

In Islamic legal parlance, the sharī‛a is “the set of divine injunctions (aḥkām, sg. ḥukm) revealed to humanity through God’s messenger Muḥammad,”12 which modern Muslim commentators divide into injunctions regarding conduct, ethics, and belief (al‐aḥkām al‐‛amaliyya, al‐akhlāqiyya, wa’l‐i‛tiqādiyya).13 Fiqh, which is often translated as “Islamic law,” is the knowledge, based on human understanding, of one part of the sharī‛a that deals with rules of conduct.14 While fiqh could be perceived as law in the Western sense of the term, it is also an ethics, as Baber Johansen15 and Wael Hallaq16 have demonstrated. Indeed, within fiqh, acts were qualified along a spectrum ranging from the obligatory, through the recommended, the indifferent, and the reprehensible, to the prohibited. This scale serves as a guide to living one’s life according to God’s will; it forms an ethical tradition of living the good life of a Muslim. This brief overview shows that concerns with interiority are not new to Islamic law. By focusing on the transformation of the grammar of a concept, I attempt to contribute to the ways one can understand change and continuity within Islamic tradition. Indeed, changes in grammar, as well as in styles of reasoning as I argue elsewhere,21 allow a tradition to maintain a certain identity with itself and also give it capacity for change. While the same terms continue to be used, the constellation of concepts with which they are used changes, and along with it their meaning‐in‐use.