International Journal of Theological and Islamic Studies

Abstract

Rights and obligations constitute the objects of legal relations, while legal persons constitute their subjects. Every understanding of personality has social, philosophical, and political consequences, and even a slight change in the understanding of personality has important consequences that shape the modern world. For example, the rejection of slavery elevated the status of slaves from property to persons and laid the foundation for modern human rights. Additionally, it can be argued that modern capitalism emerged when companies legally gained the status of individuals. The recognition of women's equality with men in terms of their personal qualities at the beginning of the 20th century in the West further increased the role of women in public life. Law acknowledges two types of persons: natural persons and legal persons. Natural/Real persons are subjects of law between birth and death. Persons of legal age have both “the capacity to act” and the “capacity to have rights and obligations”, while minors etc. have only the “capacity to have rights and obligations”.
Scholars of Islamic law introduced two basic and competing concepts to express the legal personality and the subject of the law. The first is mukallaf and the other is dhimmah. Mukallaf refers to the person to whose actions the shari'a provisions (shar'i address) are related to. Those who define the subject of law with the concept of mukallaf brought a definition of the “capacity to act”. According to this perspective, mukallafs are persons who meet the conditions of sanity, puberty, and maturity. Law and the address of the sharia are related to their actions. However, the term mukallaf excludes some persons who have rights and debts and whose actions can result in consequences, such as minors and mentally ill persons, and pushes them out of the scope of the law. Therefore, these jurists regard the mukallaf as the sole subject of the law, they do not distinguish between the ‘capacity to have rights and obligations/ahliyyat al-wujūb’ and the capacity to act/ahliyyat al-ada. According to them, there only exists the capacity to act in law. Muslim jurists did not make a special effort to fill this gap for many years and only acknowledged the capacity to act. Islamic legal scholar Dabūsī was the one who noticed this gap the best. In terms of the texts we have, Dabūsī filled this gap and stated that the subject of the law is not the mukallaf, but the “owner of dhimmah” or who has the ‘capacity to have rights and obligations/ahliyyat al-wujūb’. This was a revolutionary transformation in the history of Islamic law. The law tells us this. The legal knowledge after Dabūsī demonstrates that the main object of law became no longer the actions of the mukallaf, but the rights and obligations of the dhimmah owner. Legal capacity is not only a ‘capacity to act/ ahliyyat al-adā, but there is also a ‘capacity to have rights and obligations/ahliyyat al-wujūb/dhimmah. The capacity to have rights and obligations is synonymous with dhimmah. From birth to death, a person has the authority of dhimmah, that is, the capacity to have rights and obligations. In short, he is a legal person in terms of having the capacity to have rights and obligations, and the majority of legal provisions are related to him. The term dhimmah is sometimes used by scholars in some sects other than the Ḥanafīs, with a content close to the concept of mukallaf, and sometimes in the same context as the Ḥanafīs. All these uses of this concept in such a different meaning contradicts Dabūsī's aim in producing the concept of dhimmah, as well as the original dhimmah concept.
After Dabūsī, many Muslim jurists, especially from the Ḥanafīs, followed in his footsteps and adopted the concept of dhimmah in the meaning he intended, accepted that the real subject of law was the person who had dhimmah, and acknowledged the distinction between the capacity to act and the capacity to have rights and obligations. These jurists stated that the law would be incomplete without making a distinction based on competence. The relationship between this revolutionary distinction made by Dabūsī and the similar distinction in continental Europe is quite striking.
According to Islamic law, legal personality begins at birth and ends at death similar to the Turkish and continental European law. However, some rights and obligations may arise exceptionally before birth or after death. In particular, some exceptional rights before birth do not come into question until birth occurs. At the same time, the deceased can acquire some new rights until the liquidation of the estate, but these rights pass directly to the heirs because there is no dhimmah left that can carry this right.