70 Philosophical Frames
Mas
̇
lah
̇a, the common good, and civil societySuch modern articulations—or disarticulations—of notions and practices
of the common good opening up ways to construct and challenge national
public spheres should be assessed in light of premodern developments.
Traditionally, the notion of “public” as tightly related to specific—mostly
religiously higher—forms of goods was a specification of the idea of a
common and supreme good of all humanity, from good life in this world
to salvation in the hereafter. Premodern views of the public were not based
on a radical distinction of “private” and “public” spheres, but on a view of
the socio-legal-political order that was at once more articulate and more
compact, allowing for combinations of layers and hierarchies of values.
Within such grids, the idea of what in due time became, in Roman law and
in the Roman polity, the res publica, emerges as a good sui generis, non-
negotiable, and becomes for many authors (both from among religious
Abrahamic traditions and other traditions such as those of Plato, Aristotle,
or the Stoics) the condition for the pursuit of all other social goods.
e discourse of the common good as the kernel of publicness has Th
indeed a long genealogy that cuts across the conventional borders of
Europe or the West to encompass the heritage of Muslim societies.^12 The
religious idea of partnership in faith, and the ensuing collective action for
the common good, is rooted in classical views of the social and political
dimensions of human agency that modern theories of civil society have
difficulty identifying. For its part, Islam provided a sophisticated version
of the above-schematized Abrahamic tradition, incorporating elements
not only of Platonic and Greek speculation on the social goods and their
origin, but also of Roman law. The most important element for our pur-
poses is the Islamic jurisprudential notion of mas.lah.a, based on the root
s-l-h, which denotes being and becoming good, conveying the full scale of
positive values from “uncorrupted” up to “right,” “honest,” “virtuous,” and
“just.”^13 More specifically, the root meaning of mas.lah.a is “cause or source
of something good or beneficial.”^14 The foundation of the conceptual net-
work around mas.lah.a was laid by thinkers and discussions between the
eleventh and fourteenth (fifth and seventh hijra) centuries and was revived
by modern reformers, such as the early twentieth-century public intellec-
tual Rashid Rida and the contemporary “global” ‘ālim Yusuf al-Qaradawi.^15