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Today, however, some Islamist groups reduce Islamic law to these scriptural penalties and describe any Muslim state that does not apply them as illegitimate. As a result, the vast majority of criminal cases, including those that were nominally covered by revealed law, were left to be dealt with by the civil laws of governing municipalities, which themselves changed over time as dynasties and empires rose and fell. Even in the case of confessions, moreover, jurists allowed defendants to retract their confessions at any time prior to the sentence being fully carried out. But the jurists-whose legal interpretations represented the manner in which shariʿa was actually practiced-also placed substantial evidentiary obstacles intended to preclude the application of these punishments, generally demanding eyewitness testimony to the criminal conduct at issue, thereby making it impractical to convict defendants of these crimes short of their own confessions.

These are limited to theft (amputation of the hand) fornication (one hundred lashes) and adultery (lapidation) slander (eighty lashes) highway robbery or brigandage (depending on the acts committed in the course of the crime, the punishment could vary from imprisonment or amputation of feet or hand to death) rebellion (may be killed on the battlefield without legal consequence) and apostasy (death in the absence of repentance). The Quran and the teachings of Muhammad do prescribe certain mandatory corporal and even capital punishments for a circumscribed set of crimes. But this, too, is not accurate, and there is much dangerous misinterpretation about how shariʿa and fiqh dealt with crime and punishment in premodern times. That last category receives so much attention today that an observer would be excused if he believed it to be the central concern of Islamic law. Schools arranged these areas of focus slightly differently but shared a common conception of what spheres of human conduct were amenable to legal regulation: ritual contracts marriage, divorce, and related matters and torts, along with crime and punishment. Each had produced a text that set out its authoritative legal doctrine-what American lawyers might call “black-letter law”-covering four broad domains. By default, human actions were assumed to be morally indifferent, and express evidence was required to declare a particular act prohibited or obligatory.Īfter another five centuries of evolution, the schools had settled more or less into final forms. Fiqh differed among schools, but they shared a graded approach to human ethics, in which they generally divided human actions into five categories: the obligatory ( wajib), the commendable ( mandub), the indifferent ( mubah), the disfavored ( makruh), and the prohibited ( haram). These interpretations of shariʿa attempted to distinguish between upright or wicked human conduct in legalistic terms, and their codes operated in tandem with various kinds civil and state law. By the second Islamic century, four schools of legal interpretation had become dominant throughout the region and had begun to articulate their legal codes in more formal ways, with doctrines that could speak to all Muslims. Legal codes evolved through continual contestation and justification. Local traditions developed, with members of communities debating their shared-and differing-memories and interpretations of the Prophet’s mission.

They consolidated control over the Near East by driving out the Byzantine Empire from North Africa and the Levant and completely destroying the Sasanian Empire in Mesopotamia, Iran, and Central Asia.

THE SYSTEM OF SHARIA WAS DEVELOPED TO JOIN TOGETHER HOW TO

Muhammad died in 632, and shariʿa and fiqh developed in the following years, as his community needed to figure out how to proceed without his personal authority-especially as his successors, known as the caliphs, soon expanded his Islamic state beyond the Arabian Peninsula. Acceding to the commands of revelation required further human interpretation, and this effort to use shariʿa toward the establishment of rules for a moral life has a different name: fiqh (literally “understanding”). But it was not itself the letter of the law followed by early Muslims. Muslims believe it to have been revealed to the Prophet Muhammad and principally transmitted through the Quran and his own teachings.

Shariʿa is best understood as Islam’s specifically divine law, virtually synonymous with revelation. It is also commonly thought to be a rigid set of practices and punishments inherited directly from early Islam that are meant to be applied in a single inflexible manner. What is shariʿa? It is often translated as “Islamic law,” as if it represented the law in its entirety.

The system of sharia was developed to join together