Governance of Common Resources and Islamic Law

This book develops an Islamic theory of intergenerational justice focused on common-resource governance. It reconstructs istikhlāf and amāna as a fiduciary account of authority, extends maqāṣid reasoning across time, and places Islamic jurisprudential resources in sustained dialogue with major philosophical and legal approaches to future generations. The argument is constructive and deliberately bounded. It does not claim that classical jurisprudence already contained a completed theory, nor that an Islamic framework is superior across every dimension of intergenerational justice. It argues that, within communities accepting the theological premise of istikhlāf, the tradition supplies a distinctive account of why authority over common resources is derivative and accountable. That foundation is developed through mushāʿāt, waqf, farīḍat al-kifāya, ḥisba, ḍamān, the maxim of non-harm, and the reported Sawād policy associated with ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb. The book then asks what those resources require institutionally. It proposes five operative principles, a Five-Step Decisional Matrix, a cross-generational trade-off framework, future-generations representation, collective-waqf analogues, Neo-Ḥisba oversight, liability for deferred harm, intergenerational savings rules, and Maqāṣid governance indicators. The framework is tested through water governance, hydrocarbon wealth, sovereign debt, climate responsibility, and energy transition in Muslim-majority settings. Written for scholars of Islamic law, political philosophy, environmental law, and governance, the book offers a disciplined bridge from juristic foundations to public institutions.