Why Islam Is Incompatible with the West: A Look at the Nature of Law in Islam

Imagine a driver who approaches a stop sign, counts three Mississippis, and then proceeds into the intersection without looking for oncoming traffic. He has “obeyed” the law; he fulfilled the command literally. Yet this obedience is madness, because it treats the sign as an end rather than an instrument of public safety. The point of stopping is not the mechanical act itself; the point is the telos, the underlying purpose that gives the rule meaning.

In the Western, Judeo-Christian experience, law is teleological. Law aims at the common good, bonum commune, or what Aquinas calls “an ordinance of reason for the good of the community” (ST I–II, Q. 90). Its authority is tied to the rational moral order it serves. Law is valuable because of the good to which it is ordered.

In Islam, by contrast, law is not an instrument toward an end external to it, but is an expression of divine command whose authority is inherent in the command itself. The divine injunction is the end. The rule is its own justification. The Muslim jurist al-Shāfiʿī, articulated this: the law is law because God commanded it, not because it serves a discernible human good (al-Risāla).

Thus, the stop-sign obeyer who does not look for traffic is a caricature of the formalist tendency embedded deeply in the structure of Islamic legal reasoning. When the law is detached from teleology, its purpose collapses into its text; when the text becomes supreme, human judgment, prudence, and contextual reasoning diminish. This conceptual DNA has shaped Islamic societies, political institutions, and the Muslim encounter with modern legal orders.