Faqr, Scholarly Authority, and Non-Transferable Responsibility

This article develops a revelation-bounded Sunni conceptual-normative architecture for relating divinenormativity, juristic expertise, moral agency, and collective consultation without collapsing one into another. Its pointof departure is faqr: the creaturely condition of dependence upon God. The argument reconstructs faqr as an epistemicdiscipline as well as a spiritual truth. Revelation is not fallible, but human reception, interpretation, contextualization,and institutionalization remain creaturely acts. The article therefore distinguishes revelation from juristic readouts,scholarly epistemic authority from adjudicative and political authority, and all of these from the agent’s answerabilityfor action. Drawing on Qur’anic passages, the authoritative Prophetic Sunnah as accessed through Sunni hadithtransmission and authentication, classical uṣūl al-fiqh, distinctions among fatwā, qạ̄a’, ijtihād, and taqlīd, and modernscholarship on Islamic legal authority, the article advances five linked claims: Faqr Symmetry, Juristic Non-Identity,Non-Transferable and Additive Responsibility, Ethical Self-Deliberation under Revelation, and Shūrā as DistributedCorrigibility. Its foundational thesis is deliberately strong: fiqh is a human juristic determination of divine normativity,not revelation itself. This does not secularize fiqh or diminish its authority; it states the very condition under whichijtihād can be rewarded when correct and still rewarded when it errs. The framework preserves the need for qualifiedscholars while resisting the conversion of expertise into a soft religious caste or an unreviewable proxy for divine voice.It further proposes a seven-stage decision architecture for family, legal, policy, and social-practice settings. The paper’scentral claim is not that lay Muslims should perform unauthorized ijtihād, but that consultation cannot extinguish themoral responsibility of the person who acts. Responsibilities may accumulate across scholars, rulers, judges, institutions,and agents; they do not simply substitute for one another. The resulting architecture places every human authorityinside a revelatory perimeter: waḥy governs the field, while fiqh, adjudication, policy, consultation, and action remaindifferentiated human trusts answerable to it. A structured global evidence review of socio-legal, comparative-legal,anthropological, and survey scholarship further identifies a recurrent transregional mechanism that this article termsfunctional sacralization of fiqh: human juristic determinations may acquire practical attributes of sacred normativitywhen religious attribution is combined with legal, political, organizational, or communal mechanisms that make dissentcostly, deviant, or institutionally inaudible. Malaysia functions as an index case because it combines unusually directevidence on popular legal consciousness with codification and statutory fatwā institutions. Cross-national surveysignals and comparative studies of Brunei, Pakistan, northern Nigeria, Egypt, Morocco, Indonesia, Bangladesh, andMuslim-minority settings show that component mechanisms recur across markedly different political and legal regimes.The claim is therefore global in the sense of a recurrent transregional mechanism, not a claim of universal prevalence oridentical Muslim belief. Counter-literatures and contrast cases show that religious authority can also cultivate ethicalagency, remain contestable, or fragment rather than harden. This offers a Sunni route toward stronger ethical agency,institutional humility, and peaceful governance of juristic plurality.