Understanding Shariah

A Clear Path

Shariah is an Arabic term that Muslims use metaphorically for the way of walking in Allah’s perfect path.

Used once in the Quran, the term refers to a path that Muslims believe Allah gave through prophets to the Jews, who, in the Quran’s account, squandered it by their lack of virtue. In Muslim belief, the same logic applies to Christianity and other communities to whom Allah sent prophets. According to Islamic thought, some figures—such as Moses and Jesus—are messengers because they brought a divine law.

Yet Muslims believe Muhammad is the final prophet and messenger in Islam; through him, they think Allah revealed a clear path, shariah. It was, in Islamic thought, a restoration of what humanity knew about Allah. Therefore, in Islamic thought, acknowledging Allah’s oneness and Muhammad as his messenger—the first pillar of Islam—is the first step on the clear path.

The Sources of Shariah

The primary source of shariah is the Quran, widely believed by Muslims to be Allah’s direct speech. It reads as sermons on repentance, resurrection, and the mercy of Allah, with stories of biblical prophets such as Abraham, Moses, and Jesus. It is not a legal manual, and Muslims have rarely, if ever, considered it one.

Muslims believe the Quran has always been necessary but not sufficient to discern shariah. It does not fully detail the most fundamental aspects of Muslim devotional life, such as prayer, almsgiving, fasting, and the pilgrimage to Mecca. Together with the first pillar, these obligations are the five pillars of Islam among Sunnis.

Muhammad’s companions, however, are said to have remembered how he lived and what he shared. These memories are the second source of shariah. Generally speaking, they are known collectively as Muhammad’s customary practice, or sunnah, and individually as hadiths, reports of what he said or did.

Muslims who see the Quran explained by the memory of Muhammad are called Sunnis. Those who emphasize the memories of Muhammad’s trusted family members—seen as his heirs and the legitimate source of religious and political authority—are Shi’i (or Shi’ite) Muslims. Despite vast differences in interpretation between the two groups, most Muslims agree, in principle, that the Quran and sunnah are crucial to understanding and living by shariah.

The third source of shariah is the consensus of learned scholars. They agree, for example, that the five pillars are obligatory for every Muslim. According to most scholars, failing to fulfill them, as long as their obligatory status is not denied, does not result in losing faith. It counts as sin rather than disqualifying a Muslim from salvation.

The fourth and final source is a disciplined method of personal judgment and reasoning. When an unprecedented circumstance arises, jurists issue a ruling. One example is coffee, which was permitted because in human and social matters everything is presumed permissible unless stated otherwise. Such flexibility enables shariah to adapt to different cultural and legal contexts. The exception is worship, which requires a basis in the Quran or sunnah. All shariah rulings, whether on the five pillars or coffee, fall on a spectrum from obligatory to forbidden. Those two ends are binding; the acts between them are left to conscience and graded as recommended, permitted, or discouraged.

Over the centuries, differences between and within Sunni and Shi’i communities produced a large body of legal works, sometimes confusingly called shariah.

Scholars and Rulers

Shariah has been a battleground for the ethical ordering of society since its origin. Muslim scholars understood themselves to be beholden to Allah and his law, and rulers were not sovereign over the ethics of Islam. Islamic history is replete with scholars and religious communities challenging rulers who sought to rule in Allah’s name without a check on their power.

Muslims have been governed by caliphates, emirates, imamates, sultanates, monarchies, colonial administrations, republics (democratic and not), and socialist states. Even the early caliphate borrowed tax codes and coinage from earlier empires. Shariah is not a plug-and-play legal code that neatly fits any political system. Government administration, called siyasa, was the rulers’ domain.

Shariah and Criminal Law

In the modern period, Muslims pushed to modernize shariah, among other reasons, because appointed jurists applied the law inconsistently. Many decried criminal rulings that failed to meet the objectives of shariah. The primary objectives, as scholars defined them, are protecting religion (from apostasy), life (from murder), lineage (from fornication), mind (from alcohol), character (from slander), and property (from theft).

Certain crimes against these objectives were understood to have clear penalties, called hudud. The Quran stipulates amputation for theft and flogging for fornication and for false accusation of adultery. The sunnah records flogging for drinking alcohol and stoning for adultery, for men and women alike. In most classical legal works, leaving Islam and insulting Muhammad carried the death penalty.

The evidence threshold to prosecute was high, and lenience was the scholars’ default, but rulers could punish through appointed judges or police. How often punishment was administered is unclear. Clearer is that these punishments were and are still carried out in some nations whose criminal codes include them, putting them in plain conflict with western law, which protects religious liberty and forbids cruel and unusual punishment.

Many Muslims sought the formal and predictable legal codes of western nations, which were sometimes imposed by colonial empires on subject nations. Today, many Muslim countries apply western criminal law, retaining personal law—marriage, divorce, and inheritance—as the domain of shariah-based law. Shariah has also become a symbol of Muslim unity for some, and a political rallying cry for others.

Shariah in Western Societies

A major challenge for shariah is how Muslims can live by it in western societies. Some classical scholars thought they could if they obeyed the laws, acted with honesty, and practiced their religion. Otherwise, they had to migrate to a Muslim-ruled land. Honesty included not lying about or concealing one’s faith unless under duress and real threat of harm, an exception called taqiyya, developed by Sunnis and Shi’is but best known among the Shi’a living under Sunni authority. What counted as practicing religion was ambiguous, but it generally meant they could remain Muslim, fulfill the five pillars, and raise their children in the faith. They were encouraged to seek Muslim legal authority to marry, bury, and resolve inheritance disputes.

Many modern Muslim scholars adapt and expand upon classical scholarship, shifting the emphasis from conditions to how Muslims can witness to non-Muslims about Islam (proselytization) and build generational communities.

Remaining Tensions

Shariah is contested by its observers and Muslims alike. It at once refers to religious devotions and appears as a political ideology. The central questions remain: how it is defined, interpreted, and applied, and by whom.