The Starry Heavens Above and the Law Within: Kant’s Moral Laws & the Quran

Human dignity and rational autonomy: the honoring of all the children of Adam, the bearing of the Trust, no compulsion in religion, no soul bearing another’s burden, the demand that each person answer for his own hearing, sight, and heart.

Duty for its own sake: ikhlas, the face of God sought without recompense, the man who worships “on an edge” held up as the very image of corrupted motive.

Kant believed the moral law could be known by reason alone, without revelation—and the Quran, remarkably, does not disagree. It claims to confirm the fitra, to remind rather than to install, to address a law already inscribed on the soul that was “inspired with its wickedness and its righteousness.” On the Quran’s own account, a sincere rational inquirer working from the moral law within should arrive at conclusions the Book will recognize as its own. Perhaps the deepest evidence for that claim is that an East Prussian philosopher, working in deliberate independence of all scripture, arrived at four principles that the Quran had already spoken—in the marketplace of the defrauders, at the door of the orphan, and in the gift given seeking no thanks.

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