Sharia guides the personal religious practices of Muslims worldwide, but whether it should influence modern legal systems remains a subject of intense debate.
Most of the world’s nearly fifty Muslim-majority countries have laws that reference sharia, the guidance Muslims believe God provided them on a range of spiritual and worldly matters. Some of these nations have laws that call for what critics say are cruel criminal punishments, or place undue restrictions on the lives of women and minority groups. However, there is great diversity in how governments interpret and apply sharia, and people often misunderstand the role it plays in legal systems and the lives of individuals.
Sharia means “the correct path” in Arabic. In Islam, it refers to the divine counsel that Muslims follow to live moral lives and grow close to God. Sharia is derived from two main sources: the Quran, which is considered the direct word of God, and hadith—thousands of sayings and practices attributed to the Prophet Mohammed that collectively form the Sunna. Some of the traditions and narratives included in these sources evolved from those in Judaism and Christianity, the other major Abrahamic religions. Shiite Muslims include the words and deeds of some of the prophet’s family in the Sunna. However, sharia largely comprises the interpretive tradition of Muslim scholars.
The Prophet Mohammed is considered the most pious of all believers, and his actions became a model for all Muslims. The process of interpreting sharia, known as fiqh, developed over hundreds of years after he died in the seventh century and as the Islamic empire expanded outward from Mecca and Medina, where he lived and died, in modern-day Saudi Arabia.
Sharia isn’t the same as Islamic law. Muslims believe sharia refers to the perfect, immutable values understood only by God, while Islamic laws are those based on interpretations of sharia. Interpreting sharia requires deep knowledge of the Quran and Sunna, fluency in Arabic, and expertise in legal theory. However, modern Islamic seminaries have not standardized the level of competency nor the length of study necessary to qualify as a jurist, says Khaled Abou El Fadl, a Muslim jurist and law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Also, interpretations of sharia can conflict depending on who is interpreting them. “On any legal issue, there are ten different opinions,” Abou El Fadl says.
Modern governments have been known to alter laws considered to be Islamic. Saudi Arabia cited Islamic law when it granted women the right to drive in 2018. “If it’s truly Islamic, shouldn’t that not change? But it changed a few years ago,” Rabb says. “It’s just yet another example that a lot of the rules that are called Islamic are often local, culturally inflected preferences that come to have an Islamic veneer.”
About half of the world’s Muslim-majority countries have some sharia-based laws, typically governing areas such as marriage and divorce, inheritance, and child custody. Only about a dozen Muslim countries apply sharia to criminal law, in part or in full. Governments tend to favor one of the major schools, or madhhabs, of Islamic law, although individual Muslims don’t usually adhere to one school in their personal lives. Each school is named after the scholar who founded it, and they differ in their methods of interpreting Islamic law:
European-style law also influences legal systems in Muslim countries, even in Iran and Saudi Arabia, which claim to only follow Islamic law. This owes in part to the effects of colonialism, the requirements for economic modernization, and the fact that many of the elite who built the legal systems in Muslim-majority countries had Western educations. Opinions on the best balance of Islamic law and secular law vary, but political systems tend to incorporate sharia-based laws in three ways:
Dual legal system. In some countries with large Muslim populations, such as Malaysia and Nigeria, the government has a secular judicial system but Muslims can choose to bring certain matters to Islamic courts. The exact jurisdiction of these courts varies by country but usually includes marriage, divorce, inheritance, and guardianship.
Government under God. In countries where Islam is the official religion, the constitution designates sharia as “a source,” or sometimes “the source,” of the law. Examples of the former include Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia, while Bahrain, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates are among those that apply Islamic law in personal but not civil or criminal matters. In Pakistan, Iran, and Iraq, among others, it is forbidden to enact legislation that is antithetical to Islam. Non-Muslims are not expected to obey sharia, and, in most countries, they are under the jurisdiction of special government committees and adjunct courts.
Secularism. Muslim countries where the government is formally secular include Azerbaijan, Chad, Senegal, Somalia, Tajikistan, and Turkey. Still, Islamist parties run for office and occasionally take power in these countries. Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) is one such example.
Islamist militant groups are notorious for embracing puritanical interpretations of sharia. Al-Qaeda, al-Shabab, and the self-declared Islamic State, among others, want to establish what they call fundamentalist regimes. Such organizations rely on violence and terrorism to push their extreme versions of Islamic law, establish and expand their influence, and persecute their opponents. They have been known to mete out gruesome punishments rarely used by governments in Islamic history, such as stoning, and others that traditional Islamic law expressly prohibits, such as crucifixion.
Leaders of such groups often have little to no training in interpreting sharia. Many insurgent groups see the imposition of an extreme version of Islamic law as a way to rebuke Western influence and hearken back to when Muslims ruled powerful empires. “They focus on the power and not on the interpretation or on law as a sophisticated discipline or area of expertise,” Rabb says. “With these organizations, you have all of the trappings and benefits of claiming religious commands, but none of the substance or procedure that came along with the complex system of Islamic law through informed and changing interpretations over time.”
Some governments let independent religious authorities apply and adjudicate their faith’s laws in certain situations. For instance, the United Kingdom (UK) allows Islamic tribunals governing marriage, divorce, and inheritance to make legally binding decisions if both parties agree. Similar mechanisms exist for Jewish and Anglican communities. In Israel, Christians, Jews, and Muslims can adjudicate matters of family law in religious courts, as can members of a few other faiths. Additionally, Muslim-minority countries such as Australia, Japan, the UK, and the United States allow Islamic banking, or sharia-compliant banking.
Conversely, officials in certain Muslim-minority countries seek to block sharia from influencing state law or practice. Some have prohibited behaviors encouraged under sharia, such as veil wearing for women or ritual slaughter to make meat halal. The ban on wearing veils or headscarves exists in France, for example, where secularism is part of the national identity and conspicuous religious symbols are banned in certain public spaces. Supporters of such laws say they promote women’s empowerment and social harmony, while critics say they ignore individual freedoms and unfairly target Muslims.
