University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2014 Gharar in Post-Formative Islamic Commercial Law: A Study of the Representation of Uncertainty in Islamic Legal Thought Ryan M. Rittenberg University of Pennsylvania,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Near Eastern Languages and Societies Commons Recommended Citation Rittenberg, Ryan M., " Gharar in Post-Formative Islamic Commercial Law: A Study of the Representation of Uncertainty in Islamic Legal Thought" (2014). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 1418. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1418 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1418 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Gharar in Post-Formative Islamic Commercial Law: A Study of the Representation of Uncertainty in Islamic Legal Thought Abstract This study analyzes the conception of gharar , which is generally translated as either risk or uncertainty, in post-formative Islamic commercial law. According to Muslim jurists, gharar arises from uncertainty in commercial transactions. However, unlike other areas of the Islamic intellectual tradition in which uncertainty engenders errors, the uncertainty associated with gharar enables jurists and counterparties to make informed legal and financial decisions. Nevertheless, gharar is not structurally a form of certainty. In order to understand this interesting paradox and reach a better understanding of representation in general, this study employs discourse analysis to trace the concepts, reasoning methods, and descriptive techniques that Ibn Hazm (d. 1064), Baji (d. 1081), Shirazi (d. 1083), Sarakhsi (d. 1090), Ibn Qudama (d.1223), and Ibn Rushd (d. 1261) use in order to represent gharar .