At Shah Waliullah’s grave

Shah Waliullah’s project in his magnum opus, Hujjatullah al-Baligha, represents not only an intellectual synthesis of morality, law, theology, mysticism and philosophy but also an anthropological foray into capturing the intellectual, socio-communal, and psychological forces that shape Islam’s paradigm.

The jurisitic discussions of the pillars of faith – are not only taken for granted but also turned into socio-psychological tools of cognitive and behavioural construction. Law is embedded in a dialectic not only with social and cultural norms but also, preeminently, with psychology as a mild and sobre mystical realm. We can thus comfortably assert that Shariah, in addition to its legal-moral character, represents a field of practical mysticism, and as such it is thoroughly embedded in mainstream Sufistic ways of Islam. Islam is thus, according to Shah Waliullah, not only about law, morality and their organic confluence; it is equally about a mystical perception of the world, a perception deeply anchored in a society that does not distinguish, in the practice of living, between the meanings of the legal, the moral, and the mystical.

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