Adnan A. Zulfiqar

Duties to the Collective is the first book written on the overlooked story of collective duties in Islamic law. It explores the dynamic way in which jurists, between the tenth and thirteenth centuries CE, responded to desperate circumstances by expanding legal responsibility to maintain civilizational unity. The book uncovers how they utilized Islamic law to build a theoretical framework for greater cohesion—social and political. To promote solidarity, jurists reached into Islamic law’s toolbox and retrieved its most powerful motivating tool: duty. Jurists tasked themselves with fashioning more robust and functional doctrines on the duties central to communal life. Collective duties (farḍ kifāya) became the vehicle through which jurists sought to define a singular moral community that could endure even when the polity did not.