Sharīʿa — the Revealed Law

Sharīʿa is the divinely given path for human life; fiqh is the effort of jurists to work out what that path requires — a distinction that governs almost everything else in Islamic law.

At a glance

The word means the way to water, and the metaphor is exact: a route to what sustains life, laid down rather than invented. Muslim jurists have therefore drawn a careful line between sharīʿa, which is God's, and fiqh, which is theirs. In classical Muslim theology sharīʿa is complete and unerring, while fiqh is reasoned, revisable and plural — which is how four Sunni schools and the Shiʿi schools can differ on the same question while each holds the law itself untouched. Jurists argued hard that their opponents were mistaken; what none claimed was to have amended the law. Collapsing the two — treating a school's ruling as identical with God's command — is a confusion that classical jurists themselves warned against.

The law's reach is conventionally divided between ʿibādāt, the acts of worship, and muʿāmalāt, the dealings of people with one another: contracts, marriage, inheritance, injury, testimony, war and peace. Across both, acts are classified on a fivefold scale — obligatory, recommended, neutral, discouraged and forbidden — so that most of life falls in the wide middle ground rather than under command or prohibition. Much of what a modern reader would call ethics rather than law lives inside this scheme, which is one reason sharīʿa maps poorly onto the Western category of a legal code.

Its derivation is the subject of uṣūl al-fiqh, the science of the sources: the Qurʾān and the Sunna first, then the consensus of qualified scholars (ijmāʿ) and analogical reasoning (qiyās), with further instruments — public interest, presumption of continuity, local custom — accepted in varying degrees by different schools. Administration was historically divided: the qāḍī judged cases with binding force, the muftī gave non-binding opinions, and rulers exercised a broad discretionary jurisdiction (siyāsa) over public order that jurists accepted with varying comfort.

From the nineteenth century onward, most Muslim-majority states codified portions of the law in European statutory form, typically retaining sharīʿa-derived rules for family and inheritance while replacing commercial and criminal law with imported codes. What role the law should now play, who is entitled to interpret it, and whether codification preserves or distorts it are live and seriously contested questions, argued from within Islamic scholarship as well as outside it.

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Curated reference on Islamic belief and thought. On matters where traditions differ, positions are attributed rather than adjudicated; verify points of doctrine with qualified scholars.