Mairaj Syed
Mairaj U. Syed is an Associate Professor in the department of religious studies at the University of California, Davis. His research explores the history of Islamic legal and ethical thought, particularly areas dealing with public law, family law, and politics. He is also interested in the development of hadith literature and the social network that transmitted and preserved it in the first 250 years of Islamic history. Syed holds Ph.D. in religion from Princeton University, and a bachelor's degree in Business Administration from University of Texas, Austin.
Phone: 609-751-2279
Address: One Shields Avenue
Davis, CA 95616
Phone: 609-751-2279
Address: One Shields Avenue
Davis, CA 95616
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Books by Mairaj Syed
Through a comparative and historical examination of these ethical problems, the book demonstrates the usefulness of a new model for analyzing ethical thought produced by intellectuals working within traditions in a competitive pluralistic environment. The book compares classical Muslim thought on coercion with that of modern Western thinkers on these issues and finds significant parallels between them. The finding suggests that a fruitful starting point for comparative ethical inquiry, especially inquiry aimed at the discovery of common ground for ethical action, may be found in an examination of how ethicists from different traditions considered concrete problems.
Papers by Mairaj Syed
Through a comparative and historical examination of these ethical problems, the book demonstrates the usefulness of a new model for analyzing ethical thought produced by intellectuals working within traditions in a competitive pluralistic environment. The book compares classical Muslim thought on coercion with that of modern Western thinkers on these issues and finds significant parallels between them. The finding suggests that a fruitful starting point for comparative ethical inquiry, especially inquiry aimed at the discovery of common ground for ethical action, may be found in an examination of how ethicists from different traditions considered concrete problems.
discover its effect on the distribution of responsibility between coerced and coercer. For example, what if the threat was amputation? What if the threat was imprisonment? What if the coercer gave the coerced a choice between raping or killing a bystander? What if the coercer gave the coerced a choice between killing one of two people? What if the coercer made no explicit threat? What if the coercer threatened the coerced’s life and demanded he cut-off an innocent bystander’s finger? Medieval authors manipulated the facts of the case to explore its implications on the normative rule and the distribution of responsibilities between the agents involved. By doing so, I argue that they were testing the limits and interaction of moral principles that tugged the distribution of responsibilities in conflicting directions. Many legal presumptions and principles came into conflict in coerced bodily harm jurisprudence. Examples of such are: the principle of the equality of protection from all harm, the presumption that the physical author of a crime ought to be held responsible, the coercer’s empirical role in forcing the coerced’s act. They were doing what jurists in legal systems have always done: ethical deliberation by balancing conflicting values to arrive at a just solution. I will conclude the paper by comparing the types of reasons offered in medieval legal discourse on the problem of coercion and murder with positions taken and justifications offered in Anglo-American thought. One conclusion of my inquiry is that cross-cultural comparative investigation of ethical thought can successfully reveal competing values, not rooted in the contingent circumstances of a given author’s context, that structure a given ethical problem.
In our conversation we discuss moral agency, the formative period of legal and theological traditions, conventional presumptions about these legal and theological schools, how tradition works, interpretive ambiguity within schools of thought, various instances of coercion, wrestling with the vast amount of hadith literature, and the fashioning of interpretive norms.