On Morality and Law - Selections from 'And God Knows The Soldiers' by Khaled M. Abou El Fadl

In the Name of God, the Most Gracious, the Dispenser of Grace.

I just finished reading the book 'And God Knows the Soldiers' by Khaled M. Abou El Fadl in its third edition.  Interestingly, it is the publication afterthoughts (the fifth chapter) which got me thinking the most.  So here, I'd like to share some snippets of the book which I thought was particularly striking.  For this particular post, I have chosen the topic which I call "Morality and Law".

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From pages 144 to 147 of 'And God Knows the Soldiers', third edition:

"Muslim jurists started out with the assumption that God desires for human beings to maximize what is beautiful in life.  For instance, we know that mercy, compassion, and justice are good because they are beautiful.  These values are good and beautiful either because God made them so or because they are inherently so.  In either case, God created laws, or sanctioned the laws, that define beauty in the created existence.  These laws of beauty are not created by the Shari'ah - Shari'ah, for instance, does not define whether a flower is beautiful or ugly.  Rather, the laws of beauty are respected, accessed, and sustained by Shari'ah.  Since the Shari'ah is the Way to God, and God is the epitome of beauty, Shari'ah must, by necessity, preserve and protect beauty.  Therefore, studying analyzing beauty (or the laws of beauty) is part and parcel of studying Shari'ah.  Put differently, figuring out the laws of beauty is a fundamental part of discovering the Shari'ah itself.  The purpose of Shari'ah, according to most jurists, is to achieve the welfare of the people (tahqiq masalih or manafi' al-ibad), because the well-being and happiness of the people are part of what is good and beautiful.  As I mentioned earlier, Muslim jurists differentiated between Shari'ah, which is goodness in the abstract or ideal sense, and fiqh, which interprets and implements the Shari'ah.  Put simply, Shari'ah is the ideal and fiqh is the concrete approximation of the ideal, and therefore, Shari'ah is perfect and immutable, but fiqh is not.  So for example, Ibn al-Qayyim (d. 751/1350) argues that it is impossible for the Shari'ah to result in an injustice, and if it does then that only means that the interpretation or positive regulations giving effect to the Shari'ah were flawed.  What Ibn al-Qayyim means is that if there is a flaw, this is not because the beautiful is deficient, but because the attempt to comprehend or implement the beautiful has failed.

This paradigm becomes meaningful when we consider the purpose of the law and the logic of legal change.  If the law mandates the abstention or performance of a certain act, we must ask, is compliance demanded for its own sake or for the sake of attaining certain results?  If the law mandates compliance for its own sake, then the purpose of the law must be intrinsically beautiful or beautiful by its nature (hasan bi dhatih), otherwise we must suspect that we misunderstood the law or its purposes.  If, on the other hand, the law mandates compliance in order to attain certain results, then the law, in this situation, is a means to an end and not an end in itself.  The end must be beautiful - whether the means are beautiful or not depends on whether it is able to achieve its ends or not.  This is called hasan li ghayr dhatih.  Therefore, in every evaluative step, we must ask, is the law the law for its own sake or for the sake of a higher end?  If it is the law for its own sake, the law cannot reflect the attributes of ugliness.  If the law is the law for the sake of a higher end, then we must make sure that the law is serving its purpose.

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Now, I think this is an interesting point to ponder:
Is the law in the service of morality (what is beautiful)?  Or is the law equated to morality itself or even defines morality?

What do you think?  In practice and in our lives, which weighs more for us?  The law or morality?