ISLAMIC LAW: SHAR Ī ʿAH Shar ī ʿah is an Arabic term used to designate Islamic law. It originally referred to a path trodden by camels to a water source, and the commonly used Arabic phrase al-shar ī ʿah al-isl ām īyah may be translated as 'the Islamic way.' In the case of Islamic law, the way is one that leads the righteous believer to Paradise in the afterlife.

Classical sharia: the body of rules and principles elaborated by Islamic jurists during the first centuries of Islam. The Arabic expression Sharīʿat Allāh. Arabic is currently offered only as an OPAL (Oxford Programme in Languages) course.

The shar ī ʿah is not deemed a religious law by virtue of the subject matters it covers, for these range far beyond the sphere of religious concerns strictly speaking and extend to the mundane affairs of everyday life. Rather, its religious character is due to the Muslim belief that it derives from divinely inspired sources and represents God's plan for the proper ordering of all human activities. Although Muslims agree that they are bound by the shar ī ʿah, the interpretations of its requirements have differed historically according to sectarian and school divisions and, in modern times, also according to differing views of how the shar ī ʿah applies in the changed circumstances of present-day societies. The interpretations of the requirements of the shar ī ʿah are contained in the fiqh. In a general sense, fiqh means 'knowledge' or 'understanding,' but it is also used in the more specific sense of Islamic jurisprudence. Shar ī ʿah and fiqh are often treated as synonymous terms designating the body of rules constituting Islamic law. Qt Meta Object Compiler Installation. However, fiqh can also refer to the science of interpreting the shar ī ʿah.

Origins and Nature The historical origin of the shar ī ʿah lies in the revelation that Muslims believe was given to the prophet Mu ḥammad by God through the vehicle of the archangel Gabriel in the last decades before the Prophet's death in 632 ce. This divine revelation was later recorded in a text known as the Qur ʾ ān. Although only a small portion of the Qur ʾ ān concerns strictly legal questions, it sets forth a number of general principles regarding how Muslims are to conduct themselves. The Qur ʾ ān is replete with commands to believers to abide by God's limits, to obey God and his Prophet, and to judge according to what God has laid down.

It contains many references to God's laws and commands. The prevailing view among Muslims is that the Qur ʾ ān laid the underpinnings for a distinctively Islamic legal order and one that all Muslims are bound to follow as a token of their submission ( isl ām in Arabic) to the will of God. From this kernel the shar ī ʿah grew into a vast corpus of law. One of the great, challenging issues of Islamic intellectual history has been that of defining the relationship between the text of divine revelation and subsequent legal development, an effort that has entailed the working out of a theory of resources to provide an Islamic theoretical basis for resolving legal problems not explicitly addressed in the Qur ʾ ān. Shar ī ʿah rules were part of the positive law applied by the government of the early Muslim community, which was originally conceived as an entity where political and religious loyalties would be coterminous.

At the same time, the shar ī ʿah was also understood as a system of moral guidance for the individual believer. In the Islamic view, governments exist only to ensure that the shar ī ʿah is properly administered and enforced. Governments are subordinate to the shar ī ʿah and must execute its commands and prohibitions. In other words, what Islam envisages is a scheme of divine nomocracy, in which the law is the medium of social control —truly, a government of laws, not of men. Should the government of a Muslim society fail in its obligation to uphold the shar ī ʿah as the positive law, or the judges of this world fail in their obligation to administer justice in accordance with the shar ī ʿah, the individual believer would still be held to the responsibility incumbent upon all Muslims to conform their behavior to the shar ī ʿah.

On the Day of Judgment each Muslim will be held to account for any personal failures to comply with the commands and prohibitions of the shar ī ʿah. Classification of acts The dual nature of the shar ī ʿah as positive law and deontology, serving the combined functions of law and of what in some other religious systems might be moral philosophy, is reflected in the fact that Muslim jurists distinguish between two fundamentally different ways of classifying human acts. One way is to assess the moral character of acts, an assessment that corresponds to the deontological quality of the shar ī ʿah. For this task there exists a fivefold scheme of classification, according to which an act may be mandatory, recommended, neutral (that is, entailing no moral consequences), blameworthy, or prohibited.

Knowledge of this classification scheme enables pious Muslims to follow a meritorious course of conduct that will ensure their salvation on the Day of Judgment. The second way of classifying acts reflects the fact that the shar ī ʿah is meant to be used as the positive law of Muslim societies.

The fundamental distinction made by Muslim jurists in this connection is between acts that are legally binding and valid and those that are of no legal effect or invalid. They also distinguish between licit acts and illicit acts warranting the imposition of penalties or exposing the actor (and potentially persons in privity with the actor) to legal liability. The classifications in the two schemes are not correlated; from knowledge of how an act is to be evaluated from the ethical standpoint, one cannot draw any automatic conclusions about the legal validity or invalidity of an act or whether it is punishable or goes unpunished by worldly authorities. Likewise, one cannot safely make assumptions about how acts will be classified from an ethical standpoint based on whether they are legally valid or not or whether they entail penalties or legal liability.

For Sunn īs the possibility of divine revelation and the making of new Islamic law ceased with the death of the Prophet. Subsequent generations of Muslims who were concerned with how to establish a legal system on an Islamic basis were thus faced with a problem of scarce source material. Although there is little information on the development of legal thought in the generations immediately following the death of the Prophet, it does not appear that this problem was initially of great concern to the leaders of the community, who were preoccupied with the challenges of meeting the military threats to the growing Islamic polity and administering its rapidly expanding territory.

Ad hoc measures and a spirit of pragmatism appear to have characterized much of the decision making of the early political leaders, who also served as judges. A view common in Western scholarship is that as the new empire absorbed its early conquests of Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and Iran, it was also exposed to influences from the local civilizations, which included the very highly developed legal cultures of Romano-Byzantine law, Jewish law, Sasanid law, and the law of the Eastern Christian churches. An assumption commonly made by Western scholars is that educated converts to Islam from these cultures perpetuated the legal traditions of the conquered civilizations, which, in a syncretic process, were assimilated into the nascent Islamic legal culture. According to this perspective, the ostensibly Islamic derivation of much of shar ī ʿah law is the product of later attempts to create Islamic pedigrees for legal principles actually borrowed from other legal traditions by linking them to Islamic sources. Most Muslim scholars absolutely reject this view and take the position that shar ī ʿah law owes no debt whatsoever to any non-Islamic tradition. In any event, it must be said that the historical and comparative legal research that would be needed to prove or disprove scientifically either of these two theses has never been undertaken, and the dispute about the relation of the shar ī ʿah to other legal traditions in the areas first conquered by the Islamic empire cannot be resolved at present. Ancient law schools The jurisprudence of the Sunn ī branch of shar ī ʿah law had its beginnings in what are called the ancient schools of law.

Within a century of the Prophet's death there were prominent law schools in various cities in Iraq, Syria, and the Ḥij āz. It appears that the scholars in these ancient schools felt free to resort to ratiocination to develop legal rules for new situations and that they may also have been influenced in their approach to legal questions by the judicial practice of the tribunals set up by the Umayyad rulers. While individual scholars did attain renown in this period, what was viewed as the normative legal standard was the consensus of the scholars in a given locality, or the sunnah —roughly, 'custom' —of the school. Some attempts were made to establish Islamic derivations for such local custom, which might be ascribed to early authorities in the first generation of the Muslim community, including the Prophet himself. The traditionist movement Meanwhile, a second movement was under way, that of the traditionists, who began to make their influence felt in the course of the second century after the Prophet's death. The traditionists did not accept the authority of the sunnah of the ancient schools, nor did they accept the practice of the scholars of those ancient schools who relied on juristic opinion to resolve legal questions. Instead, the traditionists proposed that accounts relating the sayings and doings of the Prophet should be treated as legally binding statements of law.

The traditionists collected traditions, known as ḥad īth (pl., a ḥad īth ), which purported to record the Prophet's sayings and his reactions to the different situations he had confronted. Unlike the Qur ʾ ān, the final version of which was written down in 653 and which most Muslims believe accurately represents God's speech, the authenticity of the ḥad īth literature was immediately challenged by Muslim scholars unsympathetic to the traditionists' thesis. The early traditionists tried to meet their opponents' criticisms by developing criteria for distinguishing sound ḥad īth from those that were not genuine, an effort that resulted in the development of an elaborate science of ḥad īth criticism. The dispute regarding the authenticity of the ḥad īth has persisted to the present and has meant that a substantial part of Islamic jurisprudence is and always has been a source of controversy among Muslims.

The genuineness of the ḥad īth literature is yet another point on which modern Western scholars tend to find themselves in disagreement with many of their Muslim counterparts. Lighting Reality Keygen Torrent on this page. The prevailing view among Western scholars has been that most, if not all, of the ḥad īth are pious forgeries put into circulation by traditionists of the first and second Muslim centuries with a view to creating Islamic pedigrees for rules of law that had originally been the products of juristic reasoning or judicial practice, that were inherited from Arabian customary law, or that were borrowed from other legal cultures. Western scholarship has generally evaluated the traditional science of.

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