Sharia شريعة

Sharia (Arabic: شريعة transliteration: Šarīʿah) is the body of Islamic religious law. The term means "way" or "path to the water source"; it is the legal framework within which the public and private aspects of life are regulated for those living in a legal system based on Islamic principles of jurisprudence and for Muslims living outside the domain. Sharia deals with many aspects of day-to-day life, including politics, economics, banking, business, contracts, family, sexuality, hygiene, and social issues.

There is no strictly static set of laws of sharia. Sharia is more of a system of law, a consensus of the unified spirit, based on the Qur'an (the religious text of Islam), hadith (sayings and doings of Muhammad and his companions), Ijma (consensus), Qiyas (reasoning by analogy) and centuries of debate, interpretation and precedent.

Before the 19th century, legal theory was considered the domain of the traditional legal schools of thought. Most Sunni Muslims follow Hanafi, Hanbali, Maliki or Shafii, while most Shia Muslims, the Twelvers, follow the Jaafari school of thought.[1]

Islamic law is now the most widely used religious law, and one of the three most common legal systems of the world alongside common law and civil law.[2] During the Islamic Golden Age, classical Islamic law may have influenced the development of common law,[3] and also influenced the development of several civil law institutions.[4]

Sources of Islamic law

The primary sources of Islamic law are the Qur'an and Sunnah.

To this traditional Sunni Muslims add the consensus (ijma) of Muhammad's companions (sahaba) and Islamic jurists (ulema) on certain issues, and drawing analogy from the essence of divine principles and preceding rulings (qiyas). In situations where no concrete rules exist under the sources, law scholars use qiyas — various forms of reasoning, including by analogy. The consensus of the community or people, public interest, and others are also accepted as secondary sources where the first four primary sources allow.

Shi'a Muslims reject this approach. They strongly reject analogy (qiyas) as an easy way to innovations (bid'ah), and also reject consensus (ijma) as having any particular value in its own. During the period that the Sunni scholars developed those two tools, the Shi'a Imams were alive, and Shi'a view them as an extension of the Sunnah, so they view themselves as only deriving their laws (fiqh) from the Qur'an and Sunnah. A recurring theme in Shi'a jurisprudence is logic (mantiq),[11] something Shi'a believe they mention, employ and value to a higher degree than Sunnis do. They do not view logic as a third source for laws, rather a way to see if the derived work is compatible with the Qur'an and Sunnah.

In Imami-Shi'i law, the sources of law (usul al-fiqh) are the Qur'an, anecdotes of Muhammad's practices and those of the 12 Imams, and the intellect (aql). The practices called Sharia today, however, also have roots in local customs (al-urf)