What is Sharia, and where does it come from?

The short version: sharia is not a book. Muslims understand it as God’s law, the right way of acting as God wills it, and for most of Islamic history no one claimed to hold it complete in a single text. What existed on paper was fiqh, the jurists’ attempt to work out what God’s law requires, written up in the books of competing schools and applied by judges case by case. The idea of sharia as a code that a state “introduces” or “abolishes” is modern: the first state code of Islamic law dates from 1869.^[1]​^[2] Majority This page explains how the law was made, by whom, and when it changed character. Whether it is God’s law is a question of faith, not history.

The word: a path to water

Sharīʿa originally means a path, especially the way to water. The Qur’an uses the noun once, of the way God has set for the Prophet: “Now We have set you [Muhammad] on a clear religious path, so follow it” (Q 45:18).^[3] In later Muslim scholarship it came to mean God’s law as a whole: worship, family, contracts, inheritance, crime and the conduct of daily life.

Scholars drew a line that matters for every modern argument. Sharia is God’s; fiqh, “understanding”, is the human effort to discover what it requires in particular cases, and it is fallible. Two jurists could disagree about the fiqh of a question while agreeing that there was one sharia behind it.^[1] Consensus on the distinction. When people today say “sharia says”, they almost always mean a particular school’s fiqh, or a particular state’s law.

Where the law came from

The Qur’an contains legal rules, on inheritance, marriage and divorce, theft and some punishments, but they are a small part of its text. The rest of the law had to be built.

How it was built is one of the field’s long arguments. Joseph Schacht argued in 1950 that Islamic law grew out of the administrative practice of the Umayyad governors and the customs of the conquered provinces, systematized in the eighth century into the “living tradition” of each region, Kufa, Basra, Medina and Syria, and only later attributed, through hadith, to the Prophet and his companions.^[4] Majority that early law drew heavily on regional practice; Contested on how little goes back to the Prophet. Harald Motzki and Wael Hallaq argued that Schacht dated too much too late, and that legal thinking with a religious basis can be traced to the late seventh century.^[5]​^[6] Contested The tradition itself holds that the law was derived from the Qur’an and the Prophet’s practice from the start.^[7]

Four jurists and their schools

The four men whose names the surviving Sunni schools bear all lived in the first Abbasid century (§6):

• Abū Ḥanīfa (d. 767) of Kufa, remembered for reasoned opinion (raʾy) and analogy (qiyās) where texts were silent; his doctrine is known mainly through his students, who served the Abbasid state as judges.^[6] Consensus
• Mālik ibn Anas (d. 795) of Medina, whose Muwaṭṭaʾ is the oldest surviving book of Islamic law. It sets out the practice of Medina beside reports from the Prophet, his companions and their successors; fewer than half its reports go back to the Prophet himself.^[8]​^[6] Consensus
• al-Shāfiʿī (767–820), whose Risāla is the first surviving work of legal theory. He argued that the Prophet’s sunna, known through reports with sound chains, was binding alongside the Qur’an and outranked local practice, pointing to the Qur’an’s command to obey the Messenger (Q 4:59, 59:7).^[9]​^[10]​^[11]​^[12] Consensus on the argument.
• Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal (780–855) of Baghdad, above all a collector of hadith, who distrusted reasoned opinion.^[13] Consensus

These were not yet “schools” in the later sense. Christopher Melchert showed that between about 870 and 950 the regional traditions gave way to personal schools organized around an eponymous founder, with recognized texts, commentaries and teachers who certified students, so that a jurist became a Ḥanafī or a Shāfiʿī by training.^[13] Majority Other schools existed and died out, among them the literalist Ẓāhirīs. By about 1100 almost every Sunni jurist belonged to one of the four; Twelver Shia jurists developed their own law, called Jaʿfarī after the sixth imam.^[13]​^[14] Consensus Even the founders’ authority was partly built after their deaths: Hallaq argued that al-Shāfiʿī’s theory found few followers for nearly a century, until later Shāfiʿīs made him the founder of legal theory.^[15] Majority

A scholars’ law, not a ruler’s code

For a thousand years the law lived in books written by scholars, not in statutes. Caliphs appointed judges (qāḍīs); they did not write the law. Judges applied the doctrine of their school alongside local custom and the ruler’s own regulations.^[1]​^[6] Majority When Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ, a Persian secretary, urged the caliph al-Manṣūr to review his judges’ conflicting rulings and issue a single code, nothing came of it; a widely reported story has a caliph ask Mālik to impose his book on the empire, and Mālik decline.^[16]​^[8] Majority on the letter; Contested on the story.

Rulers did legislate, but beside the jurists’ law rather than in place of it. The Ottomans governed through two kinds of law: sharia as worked out by the Ḥanafī school, covering worship, family, inheritance, contracts and much of criminal law, and kanun, the sultan’s own legislation on land, taxation and administration. Süleyman I was remembered as Kanuni, “the Lawgiver”, and his şeyhülislam Ebussuud framed the empire’s land and tax law in Ḥanafī terms (§9).^[17]​^[18] Consensus

The first code, 1869

The decisive change came with the Ottoman reforms. Between 1869 and 1876 a commission led by Ahmed Cevdet Pasha issued the Mecelle, a civil code of 1,851 articles drawn from Ḥanafī jurisprudence, covering contracts, sales, obligations and evidence. For the first time a state issued Islamic law as a code: instead of consulting the books of a school, judges applied numbered articles enacted by the sultan (§10).^[2] Consensus Hallaq argues that codification of this kind turned a scholars’ law into a state’s law and ended the classical system; others see continuity with earlier Ottoman practice.^[1]​^[19] Contested

Sharia and modern states

Once law was something states enacted, states could also remove it or impose it.

• Removal. The Turkish republic abolished the caliphate in 1924, closed the Ministry of Sharia and Pious Foundations the same day, and in 1926 replaced Islamic family law with a civil code adapted from Switzerland’s (§11).^[20] Consensus
• Declaration. Pakistan’s Objectives Resolution of 1949 declared that sovereignty belongs to God; whether the state was meant to be an Islamic one is still argued.^[21] Contested on intent.
• Imposition. In 1979 Pakistan’s military ruler issued the Hudood Ordinances, bringing the fixed punishments of classical law into criminal law, and in 1980 created a Federal Shariat Court. The zinā ordinance led to women who reported rape being prosecuted themselves; the law was amended in 2006 (§12).^[22]​^[23]​^[24] Consensus on the laws; Majority on their effects. The same year Iran’s new constitution required every law to rest on Islamic criteria and gave leadership to a jurist.^[25]​^[26] Consensus

In each case a modern state, with parliaments, police and courts of its own design, decided which parts of the jurists’ tradition became law, in what form. That is a different thing from the classical system, in which no ruler could claim to have enacted God’s law. Majority

Common misconceptions

• “Sharia is a book.” There is no single book. There is the Qur’an, the hadith, and a vast literature of fiqh by many authors in several schools that often disagree.^[1] Consensus
• “Sharia is mainly criminal punishment.” Most of the jurists’ law concerns worship, family, inheritance, contracts and commerce. The fixed punishments are a small part, hedged in classical law by strict rules of evidence. Majority
• “Sharia has been unchanged since the Prophet.” The schools took their lasting form two and three centuries after him, and the codes and constitutions that now apply “sharia” are products of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.^[13]​^[2] Consensus
• “Caliphs made the law.” Caliphs appointed judges; scholars wrote the law. The first state code is the Mecelle of 1869–1876.^[1]​^[2] Majority

What scholars disagree about

How much of the law goes back to the Prophet. Schacht’s regional-practice thesis against Motzki and Hallaq’s earlier dating, and against the tradition’s own account.^[4]​^[5]​^[6]​^[7] Contested

Whether codification changed sharia’s nature. Hallaq’s case that state codes ended the classical system, against those who see continuity with earlier Ottoman lawmaking.^[1]​^[19] Contested

For the full story, see The Abbasids: law, hadith and theology and, for the modern codes, Reform, revival and empire.