The word Shari’ah is one of the most frequently misunderstood and mistranslated terms in Islam, yet it is absolutely fundamental to the faith.
Shari’ah means 'path,' or 'path to the source;' it represents the way God wishes Muslims to live, and because of this each and every Muslim, by definition, attempts to live according to the Shari’ah. For this reason, extremely few, if any, Muslims will publicly distance themselves from the idea of Shari’ah, even if they may disagree strongly with governments who claim to base themselves upon Shari’ah law.[1]
The difficulty emerges from the assumption that because a Muslim wishes to act in accordance with the Shari’ah, he or she favours the establishment of a legal system based upon a given list of punishments and prohibitions. The problem with this view is that it tends both to underestimate the extent to which the notion of Islamic law is subject to debate, and to assume rather swiftly that the laws in Islamic states are 'Shari’ah compliant.'
For instance, it is often thought that Saudi Arabia lives according to Shari’ah law. Yet the wealth that gives the Saudi government its influence across the world would not have been possible were it not for the effect of interest accrued from various forms of speculative finance; and the payment of interest, or usury, is explicitly forbidden in the Quran (for example, in verse 3: 130).
By contrast, in the 1990s the late Dr Zaki Badawi, former chair of the Shari’ah Council UK, noticed that disagreement was emerging between Muslims because some refused to recognise the British civil courts’ rulings on the subject of divorce. To remedy this, the Shari’ah council acted to back up British divorce proceedings so that divorced Muslims might be able to once again marry in their community.
[1] See, for example, Ziba Mir Hosseini, 'Muslim Women’s Quest for Equality: Between Islamic Law and Feminism,' Critical Inquiry, 2006, 32 (4), p. 629-646.
