Sharia: Islamic Law

The Sharia is the body of divine guidance that directs how Muslims worship God and conduct every part of their lives.

Often redundantly called "Sharia law," the Sharia covers both the ritual and the everyday dimensions of Muslim life. It is comparable to halakha in Judaism, and the two terms share a similar meaning. Just as halakha carries the sense of "the way," the Arabic word shariʿa originally referred to a path leading to water. God tells the Prophet ﷺ, "We have set you on a clear path (shariʿa) of command, so follow it" (Qur'an 45:18).

The Sharia covers two broad domains: the rights of God (huquq Allah) and the rights of people (huquq al-ʿibad). It informs most aspects of Muslim life, from how one prays and performs ablution to how one does business, raises a family, and governs.

The Sharia is grounded in the Qur'an and the Sunnah. Scholars derive rulings from these sources through recognized methods such as consensus and analogy.

The Qur'an and the Sunnah are the primary sources of Islamic law. Alongside them, scholars rely on secondary sources, chief among them scholarly consensus (ijmaʿ) and analogical reasoning (qiyas). They also draw on tools such as the consideration of public benefit (maslaha), custom (ʿurf), and juristic preference (istihsan), always within the limits set by the revealed texts.

The Sharia is therefore not a set of fixed codes lifted directly from the Qur'an and the Sunnah. It is a structured body of guidance built through a rigorous method of interpretation, known as the principles of jurisprudence (usul al-fiqh). See Understanding the Usul: The Foundation of Islamic Sciences.

The Sharia is God's law as revealed; fiqh is the human understanding of it. The first is infallible, while the second is the careful but fallible work of scholars.

The two terms are often used interchangeably, but there is an important distinction. As Dr. Hatem al-Haj explains in Shari'ah in Today's World: Renewing Islamic Discourse, infallibility belongs only to the explicit text of revelation, the Qur'an and the Sunnah, and to genuine scholarly consensus. Everything built on them through interpretation is a human effort to understand God's will. That effort deserves deep respect, but it should not be treated as sacred in itself.

This distinction has two consequences. Questioning a particular scholarly ruling is not an attack on the Sharia, as long as qualified scholars do so with sound method and respect for the tradition. At the same time, the fixed rulings of revelation are not open to revision simply because they seem out of step with the times.

Fiqh is the process of deriving and interpreting rulings of the Sharia, as well as the body of rulings that results from it.

Linguistically, the Arabic word fiqh means "deep understanding" or "comprehension." In its technical sense, it refers both to the work of deriving and interpreting Islamic law and to the body of rulings that emerges from that work. It is through fiqh that Muslims come to know the Sharia and how to apply it in their lives.

Say you are reading the Qur'an and come across dozens of verses emphasizing the importance of giving zakat (obligatory charity). Clearly, zakat is a major obligation. But what next? What is zakat in the first place? To whom is it given? What do I take into account when calculating it? Do I pay zakat only on the money in my bank account, or also on stocks and cryptocurrency?

All of these questions belong to fiqh. The task of the Muslim jurist (faqih) is to examine the sacred sources, chiefly the Qur'an and the Sunnah, and to identify and clarify what God asks of us and how to live in conformity with His will.

The Sharia was revealed during the lifetime of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ. After his passing, scholars developed the discipline of fiqh to apply it to new questions.

During the lifetime of the Prophet ﷺ, questions about everything from creed to law to social and political affairs could be settled in his presence. After his passing, the Companions and the generations after them faced new questions without direct access to prophetic guidance. To answer them, scholars developed methods for interpreting the Qur'an and the Sunnah and applying them to new situations. Within two centuries, the major schools of law had formed around figures such as Abu Hanifa (d. 150/767), Malik bin Anas (d. 179/795), al-Shafiʿi (d. 204/820), and Ahmad bin Hanbal (d. 241/855).

From the start, scholars guarded the diversity of the law. When the Abbasid caliph al-Mansur proposed making Imam Malik's al-Muwattaʾ the single legal code of the empire, Malik refused, explaining that it would erase the legal diversity that had developed across different regions. Tesneem Alkiek tells this history in Shari'ah: From Diverse Legal Discourse to Colonial Misrepresentation.

The Sharia aims to preserve religion, life, intellect, lineage, honor, and wealth.

Scholars identified these as the higher objectives (maqasid) of the Sharia by studying its rulings as a whole. They also recognized three levels within each objective: necessities, needs, and refinements. This is why the Sharia grants concessions in cases of necessity, and to some extent in cases of genuine need. As Ibn al-Qayyim (d. 751/1350) wrote, the Sharia is built on wisdom and on the welfare of people in this life and the next; it is entirely just, merciful, and beneficial, and any ruling that departs from these qualities is not part of the Sharia, even if someone has attributed it to the Sharia by misinterpretation.

The maqasid do not replace the detailed rulings. As Dr. Hatem al-Haj cautions in Shari'ah in Today's World, jurists must keep the objectives in mind at every step, but they may not use them as a shortcut around the texts and the established method of deriving rulings.

The schools of law (madhhabs) are established traditions of legal interpretation, each built by generations of scholars on a shared method.

In Sunni Islam, four schools endure: the Hanafi, Maliki, Shafiʿi, and Hanbali schools, named after the scholars whose teachings they developed. The Jaʿfari school is the principal school among Shia Muslims. Each school agrees on the foundations of the faith and differs on many details of practice, such as how to position the hands in prayer or which contracts are valid.

For much of Islamic history, these schools coexisted within the same society. In thirteenth-century Egypt, the Mamluk sultan Baybars (r. 658–676/1260–1277) appointed a chief judge from each of the four Sunni schools, and the Ottomans, though they made the Hanafi school official, appointed deputy judges from other schools to serve local populations. Dr. Hatem al-Haj describes the four schools as intellectual achievements built through the work of thousands of scholars across generations, and notes that most scholars recommend that students begin by learning one of them. See Tesneem Alkiek's Shari'ah: From Diverse Legal Discourse to Colonial Misrepresentation.

Only scholars with deep mastery of the Qur'an, the Sunnah, the Arabic language, and the principles of jurisprudence may derive new rulings.

The effort to derive rulings from the sources is called ijtihad, and the scholar qualified to undertake it is a mujtahid. Most Muslims are not mujtahids and instead follow the guidance of qualified scholars. As Dr. Hatem al-Haj warns in Shari'ah in Today's World, many self-styled reformers lack the qualifications to reinterpret the law, and speaking about God's religion without knowledge is among the gravest of sins (Qur'an 17:36).

Today, scholars increasingly practice collective ijtihad, in which jurists consult specialists in medicine, finance, and other fields before reaching a ruling. Councils such as the Fiqh Academy of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation have used this approach to address modern questions, such as how to finance homes that have not yet been built. For more on the relationship between personal conscience and scholarly authority, see Follow Your Heart or Trust the Scholars? The Islamic Ethics of Moral Authority.

A fatwa is a legal opinion issued by a qualified scholar in response to a specific question.

A fatwa is usually given in response to a particular question or circumstance. For example, someone unsure whether a certain drink is permissible can ask a scholar, who examines the matter and gives an answer on its permissibility. That answer is a fatwa.

A fatwa differs from a court judgment (qadaʾ). A judge's ruling settles a dispute and is binding on the parties, while a fatwa is an expert opinion that the questioner is not legally compelled to follow. Because a fatwa applies the Sharia to specific circumstances, it can change when those circumstances change. Early Hanafi scholars, for example, prohibited accepting wages for teaching the Qur'an, but later Hanafi scholars permitted it once teachers no longer received support from the public treasury, out of concern that knowledge of the Qur'an would otherwise be lost. The fatwa changed, but the underlying law did not.

Disagreement arises naturally when sincere scholars interpret texts that allow more than one reading. Within proper limits, it is a source of mercy and flexibility.

The Prophet ﷺ said that a judge who strives to reach the right answer and succeeds receives two rewards, and one who strives and errs still receives one (Sahih al-Bukhari, no. 7352). Classical scholars debated whether every qualified jurist reaches the correct answer or whether only one answer is correct in God's sight. Both sides agreed, however, that rulings reached through a sound method are valid and may be followed. The Umayyad caliph ʿUmar bin ʿAbd al-ʿAziz is reported to have said that he would not have wished the Companions to agree on everything, since their differences gave later generations room to follow any of them.

Disagreement has limits. It does not extend to matters of creed, the pillars of Islam, or rulings established by clear texts and genuine consensus. Dr. Nazir Khan examines where those limits lie in Difference of Opinion: Where Do We Draw the Line?

Some parts of the Sharia are fixed and universal, while many others are flexible and respond to the needs of Muslims in different places and times.

The Sharia is comprehensive in scope, as one would expect of a complete way of life, but it is neither entirely static nor monolithic. Some of its aspects are timeless and universally agreed upon. Dr. Hatem al-Haj lists among these matters of creed, the pillars of Islam, the forms and times of worship, quantities fixed by revelation such as inheritance shares, and core moral rulings such as the prohibition of murder and usury.

On many other issues, jurists and schools of law, and even jurists within the same school, differ in their rulings. These differences may be narrow or wide. Interpreters of the Sharia have also historically been responsive to the changing circumstances, needs, and contexts of Muslims across time and place. This flexibility, anchored in revelation and guided by the higher objectives of the law, has allowed the Sharia to support faithful and ethical Muslim life across the centuries and into the present day.

The Sharia, as it is interpreted through fiqh, lays out how a Muslim worships God.

As worshippers, Muslims pray, fast in Ramadan, give zakat, and perform the pilgrimage to Mecca if they are able. The Sharia sets out these obligations and explains how to carry them out properly.

How do I pray if I am injured? When am I exempt from fasting? How do I know when Ramadan begins? What are the steps of the pilgrimage? These are only some of the many questions the Sharia answers about worship. Manuals of Islamic law and the curricula of Muslim scholarship typically cover matters of worship first, before turning to matters of society.

The Sharia gives ethical guidance and legal rules for social life, from marriage and family to commerce, inheritance, and justice.

The Sharia addresses marriage and divorce, food and dress, business and contracts, inheritance, and crime and punishment. Scholars classify every act into one of five categories: obligatory, recommended, permissible, disliked, or forbidden. In worldly dealings, the default is that things are permissible unless a text forbids them, which leaves wide room for human choice.

Many areas of public life are only lightly regulated, by design. The Prophet ﷺ told his companions, "You know best the affairs of your world" (Sahih Muslim, no. 2363). As Dr. Hatem al-Haj notes in Shari'ah in Today's World, the Sharia gives broad principles for governance and economics, such as consultation (shura) and justice, while leaving much of the detail to human reason so that each society can choose what suits its time and place.

A large role. Islamic law recognizes local custom (ʿurf) as an important consideration in determining and applying legal rulings, provided it meets certain conditions and does not conflict with or contradict a clear text.

A well-known legal maxim states that custom is authoritative. The Qur'an itself directs believers to act according to what is commonly recognized as good (Qur'an 7:199), which can be interpreted as supporting the legal concept of ʿurf; and it defines many of the rights of spouses by what is reasonable in their society (Qur'an 2:228). The Maliki jurist al-Qarafi (d. 684/1285) told muftis to follow customs as they change rather than staying bound to what is written in books, and to answer a visitor from another region according to the customs of his own land. The Hanafi jurist Ibn ʿAbidin (d. 1252/1836) warned that a mufti or judge who follows the literal wording of past rulings while ignoring custom and context causes the loss of people's rights.

Custom never overrides a clear command of revelation, but it shapes how many rulings apply in practice. For an example of how scholars distinguish what is religious from what is cultural, see Is Hijab Religious or Cultural? How Islamic Rulings Are Formed.

Islamic law gives women defined rights in marriage and divorce, and for centuries women used the diversity of the legal schools to secure them.

Tesneem Alkiek shows in Shari'ah: From Diverse Legal Discourse to Colonial Misrepresentation how women in Muslim societies turned to judges of different schools to secure relief. Under the dominant Hanafi view, a woman whose husband went missing had to wait decades before she could obtain a divorce, so many women went instead to Maliki or Shafiʿi judges, who required a waiting period of four years. Women whose husbands left without providing for them could ask judges of other schools for permission to borrow in their husbands' names. Often, Hanafi judges themselves referred such cases to judges of other schools to help the women involved.

The same concern for justice informs scholars today. Dr. Hatem al-Haj points to the Qur'anic provision for divorced women (Qur'an 2:241) as a basis for a substantial divorce settlement (mutʿa), proportionate to the length of the marriage, for women who devoted decades to their families. For more, see Women in Islamic Law: Examining Five Prevalent Myths and Tesneem Alkiek's Marriage and Gender Roles in Islam: Beyond Rights and Duties.

The hudud are fixed penalties for a small number of serious crimes, hedged with conditions so strict that they were rarely applied.

The hudud cover a handful of offenses, such as theft and adultery, for which revelation fixed a penalty. Islamic law requires that these penalties be set aside wherever there is doubt. A conviction for adultery required four upright eyewitnesses to the act itself, a standard almost impossible to meet, and a confession could be withdrawn at any time. Theft penalties did not apply to the hungry, to goods of little value, or to property that was not securely kept, and the caliph ʿUmar suspended them during a famine. Only a lawful court could impose any of these penalties, never an individual or a mob.

As Jonathan Brown explains in Stoning and Hand-Cutting: Understanding the Hudud and the Shariah in Islam, the hudud functioned above all as a statement of how seriously God regards these crimes, and as a deterrent, rather than as routine punishments.

See full infographic: Stoning and Hand Cutting: Understanding the Hudud and the Shariah in Islam

Video: Is Shari'ah the Most Barbaric Form of Law? | Animation

It replaced a diverse, scholar-led legal tradition with rigid state codes, many of them modeled on European law.

Beginning with the Ottoman Tanzimat reforms of 1839, and under growing European pressure, Muslim states began to codify their laws on the European model, in which the state alone defines the law. The Ottomans adopted a Commercial Code in 1850 and a Penal Code in 1858 based on French law. The nation-states that emerged after the Ottoman collapse and the colonial period built their legal systems largely on Western models. States seized the religious endowments (awqaf) that had funded independent scholarship, and Western-trained lawyers displaced the scholars who had interpreted the law for centuries.

Codification also flattened the law itself. Where the schools had preserved many valid opinions, a code could hold only one. Officials assembled family law codes by selecting opinions from different schools (takhayyur) and combining them (talfiq), and these Ottoman codes became the models for personal status laws in Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Tunisia, and elsewhere, some of which remain in force. Tesneem Alkiek notes that classical Islamic law offered a range of outcomes for homicide, including forgiveness and compensation to the victim's family, while colonial codes allowed only one: execution. When people point to a law in a Muslim-majority country as "the Sharia," they are often pointing to a colonial-era code. See Shari'ah: From Diverse Legal Discourse to Colonial Misrepresentation.

The Sharia protects the life, property, honor, and dignity of every person as sacred trusts from God.

In his farewell sermon, the Prophet ﷺ declared that people's lives, property, and honor are sacred (Sahih al-Bukhari, no. 67). Dr. Hatem al-Haj counts the protection of basic human rights, including the sanctity of life, property, and reputation, among the Sharia's fixed moral principles, which no change of circumstance can alter. In Islam, these rights do not depend on the grant of a state; they come from God, which places them beyond the reach of any government to revoke.

Where Islamic law and some modern rights frameworks differ, the disagreement is between two moral visions, not between rights and their absence. Nour Soubani's Does Islam Need Saving? An Analysis of Human Rights examines how the language of human rights has often been used to justify intervention in Muslim societies while ignoring the protections Islam itself provides.

No. The Sharia's obligations of worship and personal conduct apply to Muslims, and Islamic law historically allowed non-Muslim communities to live by their own religious laws.

Under Muslim rule, Jewish and Christian communities ran their own courts and followed their own laws on marriage, divorce, inheritance, and worship. Tesneem Alkiek describes this system in Religious Minorities Under Muslim Rule. Muslims living in non-Muslim countries today follow the Sharia in their prayers, fasting, diet, and ethics, and they have not sought to impose it on anyone else.

The fear of "creeping Sharia" has nevertheless driven legislation. In 2010, Oklahoma voters approved a constitutional amendment banning courts from considering Sharia, which federal courts struck down as discriminatory. Yaqeen examines this pattern in Islamophobia and the Law: Unpacking Structural Islamophobia and the related charge that Muslims are permitted to deceive in Playing the Taqiyya Card: Evading Intelligent Debate by Calling All Muslims Liars.

Yes. Most of the Sharia concerns personal worship and conduct, and the Sharia itself obliges Muslims to honor their agreements and obey the laws of the countries they live in, except where those laws require disobedience to God.

The Qur'an commands believers to fulfill their contracts (Qur'an 5:1) and their covenants (Qur'an 17:34). Many scholars regard citizenship, residency, and visas as covenants of this kind, which bind Muslims to respect the law and security of the country that has granted them protection. Muslims can pray, fast, give charity, eat lawful food, marry according to Islamic law, and live ethical lives in nearly every country in the world.

Dr. Hatem al-Haj calls for an authentic and realistic way to reconcile religious allegiance with national belonging, so that Muslims in non-Muslim countries are neither seen nor act as a threat to their fellow citizens. See Shari'ah in Today's World: Renewing Islamic Discourse.