Istislah (Arabic: استصلاح, ) is a method employed by Islamic jurists to solve problems that find no clear answer in sacred religious texts. It is related to the term مصلحة Maslaha, or "public interest" (both words being derived from the same triconsonantal root, "ṣ-l-ḥ"). Extratextual pragmatic considerations are commonly accepted in Islamic jurisprudence concerning areas where the ''Qur'an and the practices of the earliest Muslim generations (Salaf'') provide no specific guidance.
Istislah (Arabic: استصلاح, ) is a method employed by Islamic jurists to solve problems that find no clear answer in sacred religious texts. It is related to the term مصلحة Maslaha, or "public interest" (both words being derived from the same triconsonantal root, "ṣ-l-ḥ"). Extratextual pragmatic considerations are commonly accepted in Islamic jurisprudence concerning areas where the ''Qur'an and the practices of the earliest Muslim generations (Salaf) provide no specific guidance.
Istislah bears some similarities to the natural law tradition in the West, as exemplified by Thomas Aquinas. However, whereas natural law deems good that which is known self-evidently to be good, according as it tends towards the fulfilment of the person, istislah calls good whatever is connected to one of five "basic goods". Al-Ghazali abstracted these "basic goods" from the five legal precepts in the Qur'an and Sunnah—religion, life, reason, lineage (or offspring), and property. In this classical formulation, istislah differs from utilitarianism—"the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people"—because something that results in "the greatest happiness" may infringe any one of the five basic values. Rather than utilitarianism, Istislah bears closer resemblance to deontologicalism.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).