Interpretation in islamic law: the theory of ijtihad

edged sources. The Holy Law is the totality of rules which God has laid down for the governing of Man's behavior; it is the aggregate of ahkam shari'ya. Though ordained by God, few of these rules have been precisely spelled out for man's convenience; rather, man has the duty to derive them from their sources. In the standard Islamic metaphor, the rules themselves are "branches" (furu') or "fruit" (thamara), which grow out of "roots" (usul), that is, from the sources. Only the roots are given; the branches, or fruit, are not-they must be made to appear; and for this to happen human involvement-we may call it, in keeping with the above metaphor, human husbandry-is required. The distinction between law and its sources is carefully maintained in Islamic jurisprudence. This distinction assumes that the Holy Law, as the aggregate of divinely-ordained rules, is not entirely self-evident from the sacred texts. If it were, the sacred texts would not be the sources of the law, but rather the Law itself; they would constitute a divinely given code of law. In fact, the sacred texts do not, as a rule, "state" the Law in a strictly legal sense, in the sense that a code or similar instrument states law. They do, however, contain the Law. Because the Law is buried, as it were, within the (legally) imprecise and sometimes ambiguous language of the sacred texts, it is said to be extracted from the texts; and it is for this reason that the texts are to be considered sources of the Law rather than the Law itself.