SPECIAL ISSUE

Theory and Uses of Maqāṣid al-Sharī‘a

On May 2-5, 2021, as the world stood humbled by COVID-19—the smallest of God’s creation that has humbled the mightiest—over a dozen Muslim scholars spent a portion of the Blessed Days of Ramadan in a virtual AJIS symposium. The meeting, titled “Theory and Uses of Maqāṣid al-Sharī‘a” was inaugurated by a keynote address by the senior contemporary Muslim jurist and leading commentator on the Maqāṣid discourse, Dr. Mohammad Hashim Kamali. That thoughtful presentation is being reproduced here as a fitting introduction to this collection of articles. In this brief introductory note, I provide a summary of the presentations in the symposium before turning the reader over to our learned jurist’s critical appraisal of where the maqāṣid discourse stands today.