مقاصد الشريعة
Maqāṣid al-sharīʿah
The ultimate purposes of Islamic law: the protection of religion, life, reason, honour and property.
What it means
Maqāṣid means aims or purposes. Maqāṣid al-sharīʿah are the purposes that the law as a whole is meant to serve, and jurists have grouped them under five protected goods: religion, life, reason, honour (or lineage) and property. Al-Ghazali listed five of them, and al-Shatibi of Granada developed the theory at length in his work al-Muwāfaqāt. The idea is used in legal reasoning. When a jurist faces a new case, he asks not only what a rule says but what good it is meant to secure and what harm to prevent. It also gives reformers a way to judge whether a modern ruling serves those aims.
Often misunderstood as
It is sometimes presented as a way to set the text aside in favour of convenience, but the jurists who developed it held that the purposes are drawn from the sources and bound by them.
Term and Arabic as listed in Ismail al Faruqi, Toward Islamic English (International Institute of Islamic Thought, 1995), p. 54, listed as MAQĀṢID AL SHARĪ'AH. The definition is restated here.