“…for the madhhab of Malik is to examine what leaves someone’s hand and what it then receives, and the means, i.e. what is in between, is nullified…” (Al-Qawanin al-Fiqhiyyah, Sales, 5A.)
As someone who lays no claim to authority or expert status, I cite with some reluctance my own track record in studying with others, translating, editing, typesetting and publishing works on the Islamic sciences, doing so not to challenge others’ expertise or the need for expertise, but as evidence of a concern that is life-long.
Thus a recent thread I started on social media became completely derailed in its intention by a focus, by myself and others, on the legal issues both in the principles and in the details. What was lost was my attempt to alert Muslims to a serious risk in engaging in the world of stocks and shares. It was not intended to disparage Muslims who do so, but to draw their attention to a very real danger in doing so.
Where this leads me to is the danger to the person devoted to the fiqh in particular and Islamic sciences in general of being blinded by the details from the overall picture, from the whole. Properly, there is also a danger in ‘holism’, that one skips over the very real importance of details, and, in translating fiqh as ‘understanding’, of neglecting the rulings and their proper working out. In other words there is need for an attention to the whole that does not neglect the parts, just as one must attend to the parts without neglecting the whole. One must ‘understand’ the fiqh but one must also know and understand the rulings.
Similarly, creating a mental ‘Islamic world’ in one’s head and neglecting the world in which we live is also a potentially fatal mistake. ‘The world’ we are in is also a ‘whole’ we must attend to, and understanding of it must inform our actions.