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In early modern moral and political philosophy, the term "natural law" referred to a universal moral norm which human beings are able to recognize by using their natural faculties, without the supernatural information offered by the Bible, and which is, in one way or another, connected to human nature. Natural law had been a standard topic already in medieval philosophy, but the idea of such a universal norm received new significance as Europeans confronted and colonized non-Christian people, the Christian church itself was divided into rival confessional groups, and independent territorial states became the dominant form of political organization in Europe. As a result of these developments, the character, content and implications of natural law were widely debated in early modern scholarly literature. Even though all this was done by using concepts adopted from medieval scholasticism, early modern natural law should not be seen as a unified and evolving philosophical tradition, but rather as a series of attempts to redefine a collectively shared moral and legal vocabulary in order to justify what were often quite dissimilar political aims (see, e.g., Haakonssen and Seidler 2016; Westerman 1998; Hochstrasser 2000; Hunter 2011; Stolleis 2008). ; Peer reviewed

This chapter will introduce the basic, theoretical architecture of com- peting Islamic natural law theories from the pre-modern period (ninth to fourteenth centuries). Specifically, it will outline juristic debates in the usul al-fiqh genre on reason as a source of law, where revelation is silent. Thereafter it will reflect on a range of doctrinal debates in which many of those same pre-modern jurists came to a legal determination without reference to scriptural (or any other) texts. Drawing on a curious heur- istic they labelled huquq Allah and huquq al-ʿibad (the claims of God and the claims of individuals), I will show that despite not invoking (expressly or otherwise) any natural law account of Islamic law, jurists nonetheless developed law based on a mode of rationality that could be called anything from 'rational' to 'common-sense' to 'pragmatic'. Whether or not the huquq Allah/huquq al-ʿibad heuristic is proof posi- tive of natural law in Islam is less important than recognising the scope of questions that have yet to be examined. But as I will suggest in the third and concluding part, there are political reasons (some of which enjoy disciplinary cover) that help explain why some questions are not asked, and why some answers are deemed naïve, if not impolitic.

Despite numerous attempts to invalidate the concept of natural law as presupposing the belief in God or in universal rules of human Reason, this concept is no less valid now than it was in the 13th or 17th centuries. All that is required to uphold the belief in natural law is a kind of metaphysical faith in the notion of human dignity, which provides us with the surest barriers against both unjust positive legislation & totalitarian political systems. Adapted from the source document.

For centuries, natural law was the main philosophical legal paradigm. Now, it is a wonder when a court of law invokes it. Arthur Kaufmann already underlined a modern general 'horror iuris naturalis'. We also know, with Winfried Hassemer, that the succession of legal paradigms is a matter of fashion. But why did natural law become outdated? Are there any remnants of it still alive today? This book analyses a number of prejudices and myths that have created a general misconception of natural law. As Jean-Marc Trigeaud put it: there is a natural law that positivists invented

In Section 1, I outline the history of natural law theory, covering Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics and Aquinas. In Section 2, I explore two alternative traditions of natural law, and explain why these constitute rivals to the Aristotelian tradition. In Section 3, I go on to elaborate a via negativa along which natural law norms can be discovered. On this basis, I unpack what I call three 'experiments in being', each of which illustrates the cogency of this method. In Section 4, I investigate and rebut two seminal challenges to natural law methodology, namely, the fact/value distinction in metaethics and Darwinian evolutionary biology. In Section 5, I then outline and criticise the 'new' natural law theory, which is an attempt to revise natural law thought in light of the two challenges above. I conclude, in Section 6, with a summary and some reflections on the prospects for natural law theory.