The five necessities (al-daruriyyat al-khams)

For al-Shatibi, in the book of objectives of al-Muwafaqat, the necessities are the first of the three tiers of the objectives of the law: necessary, needed and refining. ¹ They are what is indispensable for the welfare of religion and the world: if they are lost, worldly affairs run not straight but into corruption, turmoil and loss of life, and in the hereafter salvation and bliss are lost. ¹ They are five in all - the preservation of religion, life, progeny, property and intellect - and al-Shatibi adds: "they said they are observed in every religion". ²

Al-Shatibi holds that the necessities are preserved in two ways: by what establishes their pillars and strengthens their foundations - attending to them on the side of existence; and by what wards off actual or expected disruption - attending to them on the side of non-existence. ¹ The foundations of worship - faith, pronouncing the two testimonies, prayer, zakat, fasting, pilgrimage - preserve religion on the side of existence; customary acts such as eating, drinking, clothing and housing preserve life and intellect on the side of existence; transactions preserve progeny and property on the side of existence. ¹ Criminal law, gathered under commanding right and forbidding wrong, preserves all of them on the side of non-existence: retaliation and blood-money for life, the fixed penalty for the intellect, amputation and liability for property. ²

• Needs (hajiyyat): what is needed for ease and to remove the constraint that usually leads to hardship; if neglected, hardship enters on people without reaching the level of ordinary ruin. In worship, the dispensations for illness and travel; in customs, permission to hunt and to enjoy good things; in transactions, silent partnership, orchard-share and forward sale; in criminal law, the qasama oath, blood-money on the kin group and craftsmen's liability. ^{2 3}
• Refinements (tahsiniyyat): adopting what befits good customs and avoiding the defiling states that sound minds disdain, gathered under noble character; examples are removing impurity, covering the body, the manners of eating and drinking, and the ban on selling impure things. ³
• Complements: each tier has what completes it, whose loss would not undo its original wisdom - equality in retaliation, the fair maintenance and the fair wage, the ban on looking at a woman one may marry, forbidding small amounts of intoxicants, and the public rites of religion such as congregational and Friday prayer. ³

In his notes Abd Allah Draz remarks that al-Shatibi widens the preservation of religion into the purpose of all obligations; that others assign the penalty for zina to the preservation of progeny, since zina confuses lineage, and that al-Shatibi's wording on this point is unclear to him. ^{1 2} He quotes Sharh al-Tahrir that limiting the objectives to these five is established by induction from reality and the customs of religions. ² In his introduction Draz holds that before al-Shatibi legal theorists mentioned the division into necessities, needs and refinements only in passing, in the chapter on analogy when dividing the cause. ⁴

The remaining questions of the first kind in the book of objectives (the conditions for regarding complements, and the precedence of the necessary) and the history of this division before al-Shatibi are not given here.

In al-Mustasfa, al-Ghazali counts the law's purpose for creation as five - preserving their religion, life, intellect, progeny and property - and places their preservation at the level of necessities, illustrating with the execution of the misleading unbeliever and the punishment of the innovator who calls to his innovation for religion, retaliation for life, the penalty for drinking for the intellect, the penalty for zina for progeny and lineage, and deterring usurpers and thieves for property; he holds that no religion could fail to forbid destroying these five. ⁵ See: Unattested interest.