43 Facts About Sharia law

The Islamic revival of the late 20th century brought along calls by Islamism movements for full implementation of Sharia law, including hudud corporal punishments, such as stoning.

The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg ruled in several cases that Sharia law is "incompatible with the fundamental principles of democracy".

For many Muslims, the word means simply "justice, " and they will consider any law that promotes justice and social welfare to conform to Sharia.

Sharia law rulings fall into one of five categories known as “the five decisions”: mandatory (fard or wajib), recommended (mandub or mustahabb), neutral (mubah), reprehensible (makruh), and forbidden (haram).

Islamic Sharia law was initially taught in study circles that gathered in mosques and private homes.

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The teacher, assisted by advanced students, provided commentary on concise treatises of Sharia law and examined the students' understanding of the text.

Madrasas were institutions of higher learning devoted principally to study of Sharia law, but offering other subjects such as theology, medicine, and mathematics.

Islamic Sharia law required judges to be familiar with local customs, and they exercised a number of other public functions in the community, including mediation and arbitration, supervision of public works, auditing waqf finances, and looking after the interests of orphans.

The Sharia law derived its authority not from political control, but rather from the collective doctrinal positions of the legal schools in their capacity as interpreters of the scriptures.

Additionally, since Sharia contained few provisions in several areas of public law, Muslim rulers were able to legislate various collections of economic, criminal and administrative laws outside the jurisdiction of Islamic jurists, the most famous of which is the qanun promulgated by Ottoman sultans beginning from the 15th century.

Traditional Islamic Sharia law assumes a patriarchal society with a man at the head of the household.

Sharia law was intended to regulate affairs of the Muslim community.

In family matters the Sharia law court was seen as a place where the rights of women could be asserted against their husband's transgressions.

The resulting legal system, known as Anglo-Muhammadan Sharia law, was treated by the British as a model for legal reforms in their other colonies.

This, together with their conception of Islamic law as a collection of inflexible rules, led to an emphasis on traditionalist forms of Sharia that were not rigorously applied in the pre-colonial period and served as a formative influence on the modern identity politics of the Muslim world.

Westernization of legal institutions and expansion of state control in all areas of Sharia law, which began during the colonial era, continued in nation-states of the Muslim world.

Abduh viewed only Sharia rules pertaining to religious rituals as inflexible, and argued that the other Islamic laws should be adapted based on changing circumstances in consideration of social well-being.

Sharia law championed a creative approach to ijtihad that involved direct interpretation of scriptures as well as the methods of takhayyur and talfiq.

Sharia law drafted the civil codes of Egypt and Iraq (1951) based on a variety of sources, including classical fiqh, European laws, existing Arab and Turkish codes, and the history of local court decisions.

For example, the 1979 reform of Egyptian family Sharia law, promulgated by Anwar Sadat through presidential decree, provoked an outcry and was annulled in 1985 by the supreme court on procedural grounds, to be later replaced by a compromise version.

The 2003 reform of Moroccan family Sharia law, which sought to reconcile universal human rights norms and the country's Islamic heritage, was drafted by a commission that included parliamentarians, religious scholars and feminist activists, and the result has been praised by international rights groups as an example of progressive legislation achieved within an Islamic framework.

Full implementation of Sharia theoretically refers to expanding its scope to all fields of law and all areas of public life.

Nonetheless, Islamization campaigns have had repercussions in several other areas of Sharia law, leading to curtailment of rights of women and religious minorities, and in the case of Sudan contributing to the breakout of a civil war.

The various ways in which property can be acquired under Sharia law are purchase, inheritance, bequest, physical or mental effort, diya and donations.

Sharia law plays a role beyond religious rituals and personal ethics in some countries with Muslim minorities.

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Unlike common law, judges' verdicts do not set binding precedents under the principle of stare decisis, and unlike civil law, Sharia is left to the interpretation in each case and has no formally codified universal statutes.

The Sharia law was invoked in an unsuccessful blasphemy suit against the feminist author Nawal El Saadawi.

Sharia law'sba has been invoked in several Muslim-majority countries as rationale for blocking pornographic content on the internet and for other forms of faith-based censorship.

However, while most of those who support implementation of Sharia law favor using it in family and property disputes, fewer supported application of severe punishments such as whippings and cutting off hands, and interpretations of some aspects differed widely.

The issue of "liberty versus Sharia law" was called a "momentous civilisational debate" by right-wing pundit Diana West.

In Canada, for example, sharia law has been explicitly banned in Quebec by a 2005 unanimous vote of the National Assembly, while the province of Ontario allows family law disputes to be arbitrated only under Ontario law.

Those who adhere to a confrontational view of Sharia law tend to ascribe many undesirable practices to Sharia law and religion overlooking custom and culture, even if high-ranking religious authorities have stated the opposite.

Refah's Sharia law-based notion of a "plurality of legal systems, grounded on religion" was ruled to contravene the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms.

Patrick Glenn states that Sharia law is structured around the concept of mutual obligations of a collective, and it considers individual human rights as potentially disruptive and unnecessary to its revealed code of mutual obligations.

Abdel al-Hakeem Carney, in contrast, states that Sharia law is misunderstood from a failure to distinguish Sharia law from siyasah.

The expert on terrorism Rachel Ehrenfeld wrote that the "Sharia law's finance is a new weapon in the arsenal of what might be termed fifth-generation warfare (5GW)".

Islamic Sharia law granted Muslim women certain legal rights, such as property rights which women in the West did not possess until "comparatively recent times".

Sharia law recognizes the basic inequality between master and slave, between free women and slave women, between believers and non-believers, as well as their unequal rights.

Sharia law authorized the institution of slavery, using the words abd and the phrase ma malakat aymanukum ("that which your right hand owns") to refer to women slaves, seized as captives of war.

The fiqh literature parallels rabbinical Sharia law developed in the Talmud, with fatwas being analogous to rabbinic responsa.

Early Islamic Sharia law developed a number of legal concepts that anticipated similar such concepts that later appeared in English common Sharia law.

Sharia law argued that these systems shared fundamental freedoms: the freedom of a professor to profess his personal opinion and the freedom of a student to pass judgement on what he is learning.

For example, Sharia classically recognizes only natural persons, and never developed the concept of a legal person, or corporation, i e, a legal entity that limits the liabilities of its managers, shareholders, and employees; exists beyond the lifetimes of its founders; and that can own assets, sign contracts, and appear in court through representatives.