University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2018 Collective Duties (farḍ Kifāya) In Islamic Law: The Moral Community, State Authority And Ethical Speculation In The Premodern Period Adnan Zulfiqar University of Pennsylvania,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Islamic Studies Commons, Law Commons, and the Near Eastern Languages and Societies Commons Recommended Citation Zulfiqar, Adnan, "Collective Duties (farḍ Kifāya) In Islamic Law: The Moral Community, State Authority And Ethical Speculation In The Premodern Period" (2018). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 3212. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/3212 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/3212 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Collective Duties (farḍ Kifāya) In Islamic Law: The Moral Community, State Authority And Ethical Speculation In The Premodern Period Abstract This dissertation studies a unique subset of legal obligations in Islamic law known as “collective duties” (farḍ kifāya) and focuses on juristic writing in the premodern period between the 9th and 14th centuries C.E. Together with the more widely recognized “individual obligations” (farḍ ʿayn), these duties encompass the complete range of mandated behavior in Islamic law. Individual obligations follow a simple pattern: one person is assigned responsibility for performing a particular act and is solely held responsible if they fail to do so. Collective duties are premised on a different concept involving shared responsibility for required acts. They are based on a formula consisting of two clauses, which loosely draws from a Qurʾānic prooftext. The first clause states that as long as some people perform the duty, then the obligation is suspended for everyone else.