The Best Sharia Law Definition on the Internet in 10 Steps
It is difficult, when researching this topic, to decide whether Sharia Law is as controversial as it is misunderstood. Take an example. A Pew Research Center survey found that an overwhelming majority of Muslims around the world wanted Sharia as their country’s law. Combine this with the all too familiar clickbait headlines that either plague or permeate your daily life (‘PHOTOS: ISIS Publically Amputates Hand of ‘Thief’ in Accordance with Sharia Law’ or ‘Afghanistan Migration Surging into America; 99% Support Sharia Law’), and you may start to panic
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Look more closely, however, and you’ll see that those sampled disagreed over practically every aspect of Sharia Law, from what is should consist of to who should be subject to it. If this seems paradoxical – the fact that Muslims could be so divided over their own fundamental doctrine – you have only to try to define Sharia Law yourself.
Sharia – ????? in Arabic – roughly translates into English as the ‘path to the watering hole’, the watering hole being Allah. The imagery is simple and clear. Sharia represents a moral code, a sacred system of principles; in a less profane sense, it’s a sort of how-to manual for emulating the Prophet. Introduce the term law, though, and things get tricky.
Sharia Law is incomparable with anything the West has to offer. True, it provides a legalistic framework for some areas – familial relationships, finances and inheritance, for example, – but it also prescribes how a Muslim should conduct themselves in almost every matter of their daily lives: from social etiquette, to how to wash oneself. Furthermore, it’s not codified. This doesn’t just mean it eludes simple definition. It means it often eludes basic understanding. Interpretative yet clear; amorphous yet bodied; analogous to precedent yet established – all of these terms have been, and continue to be, applied to Sharia Law.
In this list I’m going to attempt to reach a working definition of Sharia Law, addressing the topic in a way that I believe all religious topics should be addressed: respectfully, but with rational and historically contextualized criticism.
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