Tawhid and Shari'ah

This book invokes the Tawhidi ontological foundation of the Quranic law and worldview, and is also a study of tawil, the esoteric meaning of Quranic verses. It presents a comparative analysis between the Tawhidi methodology and the contemporary subject of Shariah. Masudul Alam Choudhury brings about a serious criticism of the traditional understanding of Shariah as Islamic law contrary to the holistic socio-scientific worldview of the unity of knowledge arising from Tawhid as the law. A bold repudiation of the Islamic traditional understanding and the school of theocracy, Choudhurys critique is in full consonance with the Quran and Sunnah. It is critical of the sectarian (madhab) conception of relational independence of facts. Thus the non-creative outlook of Shariah contrasts with universality and uniqueness of Tawhid as the analytically established law explaining the monotheistic organic unity of being and becoming in everything. This wide and strict methodological development of the Tawhidi worldview is articulated in this work. The only way that Tawhid and Shari'ah can converge as law is in terms of developing the Tawhidi methodology, purpose and objective of the universal and unique law in consonance with the ontology of Tawhid. Such a convergence in the primal ontological sense of Tawhid is termed as maqasid as-shari'ah al-Tawhid.