Sharīʿah

▪ Islamic law

Introduction

also spelled  Sharia 

 the fundamental religious concept of Islām, namely its law, systematized during the 2nd and 3rd centuries of the Muslim era (8th–9th centuries AD).

      Total and unqualified submission to the will of Allāh (God) is the fundamental tenet of Islām: Islāmic law is therefore the expression of Allāh's command for Muslim society and, in application, constitutes a system of duties that are incumbent upon a Muslim by virtue of his religious belief. Known as the Sharīʿah (literally, “the path leading to the watering place”), the law constitutes a divinely ordained path of conduct that guides the Muslim toward a practical expression of his religious conviction in this world and the goal of divine favour in the world to come.

Nature and significance of Islāmic law

      Muslim jurisprudence, the science of ascertaining the precise terms of the Sharīʿah, is known as fiqh (literally “understanding”). The historical process of the discovery of Allāh's law (see below) was regarded as completed by the end of the 9th century when the law had achieved a definitive formulation in a number of legal manuals written by different jurists. Throughout the medieval period this basic doctrine was elaborated and systematized in a large number of commentaries, and the voluminous literature thus produced constitutes the traditional textual authority of Sharīʿah law.

      In classical form the Sharīʿah (comparative law) differs from Western systems of law in two principal respects. In the first place the scope of the Sharīʿah is much wider, since it regulates man's relationship not only with his neighbours and with the state, which is the limit of most other legal systems, but also with his God and his own conscience. ritual practices, such as the daily prayers, almsgiving, fasting, and pilgrimage, are an integral part of Sharīʿah law and usually occupy the first chapters in the legal manuals. The Sharīʿah is also concerned as much with ethical (ethics) standards as with legal rules, indicating not only what man is entitled or bound to do in law, but also what he ought, in conscience, to do or refrain from doing. Accordingly, certain acts are classified as praiseworthy (mandūb), which means that their performance brings divine favour and their omission divine disfavour, and others as blameworthy (makrūh), which means that omission brings divine favour and commission divine disfavour; but in neither case is there any legal sanction of punishment or reward, nullity or validity. The Sharīʿah is not merely a system of law, but a comprehensive code of behaviour that embraces both private and public activities.

      The second major distinction between the Sharīʿah and Western legal systems is the result of the Islāmic concept of law as the expression of the divine will. With the death of the Prophet Muḥammad in 632, communication of the divine will to man ceased so that the terms of the divine revelation were henceforth fixed and immutable. When, therefore, the process of interpretation and expansion of this source material was held to be complete with the crystallization of the doctrine in the medieval legal manuals, Sharīʿah law became a rigid and static system. Unlike secular legal systems that grow out of society and change with the changing circumstances of society, Sharīʿah law was imposed upon society from above. In Islāmic jurisprudence it is not society that moulds and fashions the law, but the law that precedes and controls society.

      Such a philosophy of law clearly poses fundamental problems of principle for social advancement in contemporary Islām. How can the traditional Sharīʿah law be adapted to meet the changing circumstances of modern Muslim society? This is now the central issue in Islāmic law. (See below Reform of Sharīʿah law).

Historical development of Sharīʿah law

      For the first Muslim community established under the leadership of the Prophet at Medina in 622, the Qurʾānic (Qurʾān) revelations laid down basic standards of conduct. But the Qurʾān is in no sense a comprehensive legal code. No more than 80 verses deal with strictly legal matters; while these verses cover a wide variety of topics and introduce many novel rules, their general effect is simply to modify the existing Arabian customary law in certain important particulars.

      During his lifetime Muḥammad, as the supreme judge of the community, resolved legal problems as they arose by interpreting and expanding the general provisions of the Qurʾān, and the same ad hoc activity was carried on after his death by the caliphs (temporal and spiritual rulers) of Medina. But the foundation of the Umayyad Dynasty in 661, governing from its centre of Damascus a vast military empire, produced a legal development of much broader dimensions. With the appointment of judges, or qāḍīs (qadi), to the various provinces and districts, an organized judiciary came into being. The qāḍīs were responsible for giving effect to a growing corpus of Umayyad administrative and fiscal law; and since they regarded themselves essentially as the spokesmen of the local law, elements and institutions of Roman-Byzantine and Persian-Sāsānian law were absorbed into Islāmic legal practice in the conquered territories. Depending upon the discretion of the individual qāḍī, decisions would be based upon the rules of the Qurʾān where these were relevant; but the sharp focus in which the Qurʾānic laws were held in the Medinian period had become lost with the expanding horizons of activity.

Development of different schools (legal education) of law

      A reaction to this situation arose in the early 8th century when pious scholars, grouped together in loose, studious fraternities, began to debate whether or not Umayyad legal practice was properly implementing the religious ethic of Islām. Actively sponsored by the ʿAbbāsid rulers, who came to power in the mid-8th century pledged to build a truly Islāmic state and society, the activities of the jurists (faqīh, plural fuqahāʾ) in these early schools of law marked the real beginning of Islāmic jurisprudence. Their aim was to Islāmize the law by reviewing the current legal practice in the light of the Qurʾānic principles and then on this basis adopting, modifying, or rejecting the practice as part of their ideal scheme of law.

      Of the many early schools of law the two most important were those of the Mālikīs (Mālikīyah) in Medina and the Ḥanafīs (Ḥanafīyah) in al-Kūfah, named after two outstanding scholars in the respective localities, Mālik ibn Anas and Abū Ḥanīfah. Inevitably the Mālikī and Ḥanafī doctrines, as they were then being recorded in the first compendiums of law, differed considerably from each other, not only because free juristic speculation was bound to produce varying results but also because the thought of the scholars was conditioned by their different social environments. A deep conflict of juristic principle emerged within the schools between those who maintained that outside the terms of the Qurʾān scholars were free to use their reason (raʾy) to ascertain the law and those who insisted that the only valid source of law outside the Qurʾān lay in the precedents set by the Prophet himself.

      The jurist ash-Shāfiʿī (Shāfiʿī, Abū ʿAbd Allāh ash-) (died 820) aimed to eliminate these schisms and produce greater uniformity in the law by expounding a firm theory of the sources from which the law must be derived. Ash-Shāfiʿī's fundamental teaching was that knowledge of the Sharīʿah could be attained only through divine revelation found either in the Qurʾān or in the divinely inspired traditions (sunnah) of the Prophet as ascertained through authentic reports ( Ḥadīth). Human reason in law should be strictly confined to the process of analogical deduction, or qiyās (qiyas)—problems not specifically answered by the divine revelation were to be solved by applying the principles upon which closely parallel cases had been regulated by the Qurʾān or sunnah (sunna).

      Shāfiʿī's insistence upon the importance of the sunnah as a source of law produced a great activity in the collection and classification of Ḥadīths, particularly among his own supporters, who formed the Shāfiʿī school, and the followers of Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal (died 855) who formed the Ḥanbalī school. Muslim scholarship maintained that the classical compilations of Ḥadīths—especially those of Bukhārī (died 870) and Muslim (died 875)—constituted an authentic record of the Prophet's precedents. The general view of Western orientalists, however, is that a considerable part of the sunnah represents the views of later jurists fictitiously ascribed to the Prophet to give the doctrine a greater authority.

Later developments

      Shāfiʿī's thesis formed the basis of the classical theory of the roots of jurisprudence (uṣūl al-fiqh), which crystallized in the early 10th century. Juristic “effort” to comprehend the terms of the Sharīʿah is known as ijtihād, and legal theory first defines the course that ijtihād must follow. In seeking the answer to a legal problem the jurist must first consult the Qurʾān and the sunnah. Failing any specific solution in this divine revelation he must employ analogy (qiyās) or certain subsidiary principles of reasoning—istiḥsān (equitable preference) and istiṣlāḥ (the public interest). The legal theory then evaluates the results of ijtihād on the basis of the criterion of ijmāʿ (consensus). As an attempt to define Allāh's law, the ijtihād of individual scholars could result only in a tentative conclusion termed ẓann (“conjecture”). But where a conclusion became the subject of unanimous agreement by the qualified scholars, it became a certain (yaqīn) and infallible expression of Allāh's law.

      Two major effects flowed from this classical doctrine of ijmāʿ. It served first as a permissive principle to admit the validity of variant opinions as equally probable attempts to define the Sharīʿah. Second, it operated as a restrictive principle to ratify the status quo; for once the ijmāʿ had cast an umbrella authority not only over those points that were the subject of a consensus but also over existing variant opinions, to propound any further variant was to contradict the infallible ijmāʿ and therefore tantamount to heresy.

      Ijmāʿ set the final seal of rigidity upon the doctrine, and from the 10th century onward independent juristic speculation ceased. In the Arabic expression, “the door of ijtihād was closed.” Henceforth jurists were muqallids, or imitators, bound by the doctrine of taqlīd (taqlid) (“clothing with authority” i.e., unquestioned acceptance) to follow the doctrine as it was recorded in the authoritative legal manuals.

      Sharīʿah law is a candidly pluralistic system, the philosophy of the equal authority of the different schools being expressed in the alleged dictum of the Prophet: “Difference of opinion among my community is a sign of the bounty of Allāh.” But outside the four schools of Sunnī, or orthodox, Islām stand the minority sects of the Shīʿah (Shīʿite) and the Ibāḍīs whose own versions of the Sharīʿah differ considerably from those of the Sunnīs. Shīʿī law in particular grew out of a fundamentally different politico-religious system in which the rulers, or imāms, were held to be divinely inspired and therefore the spokesmen of the Lawgiver himself. Geographically, the division between the various schools and sects became fairly well defined as the qāḍīs' courts in different areas became wedded to the doctrine of one particular school. Thus Ḥanafī law came to predominate in the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent; Mālikī law in North, West, and Central Africa; Shāfiʿī law in East Africa, the southern parts of the Arabian peninsula, Malaysia, and Indonesia; Ḥanbalī law in Saudi Arabia, Shīʿī law in Iran and the Shīʿī communities of India and East Africa; Ibāḍī law in Zanzibar, ʿUman, and parts of Algeria.

      Although Sharīʿah doctrine was all-embracing, Islāmic legal practice has always recognized jurisdictions other than that of the qāḍīs. Because the qāḍis' courts were hidebound by a cumbersome system of procedure and evidence, they did not prove a satisfactory organ for the administration of justice in all respects, particularly as regards criminal, land, and commercial law. Hence, under the broad head of the sovereign's administrative power (siyāsah), competence in these spheres was granted to other courts, known collectively as maẓālim courts, and the jurisdiction of the qāḍīs was generally confined to private family and civil law. As the expression of a religious ideal, Sharīʿah doctrine was always the focal point of legal activity, but it never formed a complete or exclusively authoritative expression of the laws that in practice governed the lives of Muslims.

The substance of traditional Sharīʿah law

      Sharīʿah duties are broadly divided into those that an individual owes to Allāh (the ritual practices or ʿibādāt) and those that he owes to his fellow men (muʿāmalāt). It is the latter category of duties alone, constituting law in the Western sense, that is described here.

Penal law (criminal law)

      Offenses against the person, from homicide to assault, are punishable by retaliation (qiṣāṣ), the offender being subject to precisely the same treatment as his victim. But this type of offense is regarded as a civil injury rather than a crime in the technical sense, since it is not the state but only the victim or his family who have the right to prosecute and to opt for compensation or blood money (diyah) in place of retaliation.

      For six specific crimes (crime) the punishment is fixed (ḥadd): death for apostasy and for highway robbery; amputation of the hand for theft; death by stoning for extramarital sex relations (zinā) where the offender is a married person and 100 lashes for unmarried offenders; 80 lashes for an unproved accusation of unchastity (qadhf) and for the drinking of any intoxicant.

      Outside the ḥadd crimes, both the determination of offenses and the punishment therefore lies with the discretion of the executive or the courts.

Law of transactions

      A legal capacity to transact belongs to any person “of prudent judgment” (rāshid), a quality that is normally deemed to arrive with physical maturity or puberty. There is an irrebuttable presumption of law (1) that boys below the age of 12 and girls below the age of 9 have not attained puberty, and (2) that puberty has been attained by the age of 15 for both sexes. Persons who are not rāshid, on account of minority, mental deficiency, simplicity, or prodigality, are placed under interdiction: their affairs are managed by a guardian and they cannot transact effectively without the guardian's consent.

      The basic principles of the law are laid down in the four root transactions (commercial transaction) of (1) sale (bayʿ), transfer of the ownership or corpus of property (property law) for a consideration; (2) hire (ijārah), transfer of the usufruct (right to use) of property for a consideration; (3) gift (hibah), gratuitous transfer of the corpus of property, and (4) loan (ʿāriyah), gratuitous transfer of the usufruct of property. These basic principles are then applied to the various specific transactions of, for example, pledge, deposit, guarantee, agency, assignment, land tenancy, partnership, and waqf foundations. Waqf is a peculiarly Islāmic institution whereby the founder relinquishes his ownership of real property, which belongs henceforth to Allāh, and dedicates the income or usufruct of the property in perpetuity to some pious or charitable purpose, which may include settlements in favour of the founder's own family.

      The Islāmic law of transactions as a whole is dominated by the doctrine of ribā. Basically, this is the prohibition of usury, but the notion of ribā was rigorously extended to cover, and therefore preclude, any form of interest on a capital loan or investment. And since this doctrine was coupled with the general prohibition on gambling transactions, Islāmic law does not, in general, permit any kind of speculative transaction the results of which, in terms of the material benefits accruing to the parties, cannot be precisely forecast.

family law

      A patriarchal outlook is the basis of the traditional Islāmic law of family relationships. Fathers have the right to contract their daughters, whether minor or adult, in compulsory marriage (marriage law). Only when a woman has been married before is her consent to her marriage necessary; but even then the father, or other marriage guardian, must conclude the contract on her behalf. In Ḥanafī and Shīʿī law, however, only minor girls may be contracted in compulsory marriage, and adult women may conclude their own marriage contracts, except that the guardian may have the marriage annulled if his ward has married beneath her social status.

      Husbands have the right of polygamy and may be validly married at the same time to a maximum of four wives. Upon marriage a husband is obliged to pay to his wife her dower, the amount of which may be fixed by agreement or by custom; and during the marriage he is bound to maintain and support her provided she is obedient to him, not only in domestic matters but also in her general social activities and conduct. A wife who rejects her husband's dominion by leaving the family home without just cause forfeits her right to maintenance.

      But it is in the traditional law of divorce that the scales are most heavily weighted against the wife. A divorce may be effected simply by the mutual agreement of the spouses, which is known as khulʿ when the wife pays some financial consideration to the husband for her release; and according to all schools except the Ḥanafīs a wife may obtain a judicial decree of divorce on the ground of some matrimonial offense—e.g., cruelty, desertion, failure to maintain—committed by the husband. But the husband alone has the power unilaterally to terminate the marriage by repudiation (ṭalāĪ) of his wife. ṬalāĪ is an extrajudicial process: a husband may repudiate his wife at will and his motive in doing so is not subject to scrutiny by the court or any other official body. A repudiation repeated three times constitutes a final and irrevocable dissolution of the marriage; but a single pronouncement may be revoked at will by the husband during the period known as the wife's ʿiddah, which lasts for three months following the repudiation (or any other type of divorce) or, where the wife is pregnant, until the birth of the child.

      The legal position of children within the family group, as regards their guardianship, maintenance, and rights of succession, depends upon their legitimacy, and a child is legitimate only if it is conceived during the lawful wedlock of its parents. In Sunnī law no legal relationship exists between a father and his illegitimate (illegitimacy) child; but there is a legal tie, for all purposes, between a mother and her illegitimate child. Guardianship of the person (e.g., control of education and marriage) and of the property of minor children belongs to the father or other close male, agnate relative, but the bare right of custody (ḥaḍānah) of young children, whose parents are divorced or separated, belongs to the mother or the female, maternal relatives.

Succession law

      An individual's power of testamentary disposition is basically limited to one-third of his net estate (i.e., the assets remaining after the payment of funeral expenses and debts) and two-thirds of the estate passes to the legal heirs of the deceased under the compulsory rules of inheritance.

      There is a fundamental divergence between the Sunnī and the Shīʿī schemes of inheritance. Sunnī law is essentially a system of inheritance by male agnate relatives or ʿaṣabah—i.e., relatives who, if they are more than one degree removed from the deceased, trace their connection with him through male links. Among the ʿaṣabah, priority is determined by: (1) class, descendants excluding ascendants, who in turn exclude brothers and their issue, who in turn exclude uncles and their issue; (2) degree, within each class the relative nearer in degree to the deceased excluding the more remote; (3) strength of blood tie, the germane, or full blood, connection excluding the half blood, or consanguine, connection among collateral relatives. This agnatic system is mitigated by allowing the surviving spouse and a limited number of females and nonagnates—the daughter; son's daughter; mother; grandmother; germane, consanguine, and uterine sisters; and uterine brother—to inherit a fixed fractional portion of the estate in suitable circumstances. But the females among these relatives only take half the share of the male relative of the same class, degree, and blood tie, and none of them excludes from inheritance any male agnate, however remote. No other female or non-agnatic relative has any right of inheritance in the presence of a male agnate. Where, for example, the deceased is survived by his wife, his daughter's son, and a distant agnatic cousin, the wife will be restricted to one-fourth of the inheritance, the grandson will be excluded altogether, and the cousin will inherit three-fourths of the estate.

      Shīʿī law rejects the criterion of the agnatic tie and regards both the maternal and paternal connections as equally strong grounds of inheritance. In the Shīʿī system the surviving spouse always inherits a fixed portion, as in Sunnī law, but all other relatives, including females and nonagnates, are divided into three classes: (1) parents and lineal descendants; (2) grandparents, brothers and sisters, and their issue; (3) uncles and aunts and their issue. Any relative of class one excludes any relative of class two, who in turn excludes any relative of class three. Within each class the nearer in degree excludes the more remote, and the full blood excludes the half blood. While, therefore, a male relative normally takes double the share of the corresponding female relative, females and nonagnates are much more favourably treated than they are in Sunnī law. In the case mentioned above, for example, the wife would take one-fourth, but the remaining three-fourths would go to the daughter's son, or indeed to a daughter's daughter, and not to the agnatic cousin.

      Under Shīʿī law the only restriction upon testamentary power is the one-third rule, but Sunnī law goes further and does not allow any bequest in favour of a legal heir. Under both systems, however, bequests that infringe these rules are not necessarily void and ineffective; the testator has acted beyond his powers, but the bequest may be ratified by his legal heirs.

      Further protection is afforded to the rights of the legal heirs by the doctrine of death sickness. Any gifts made by a dying person in contemplation of his death are subject to precisely the same limitations as bequests, and, if they exceed these limits, will be effective only with the consent of the legal heirs.

Procedure (procedural law) and evidence

      Traditionally, Sharīʿah law was administered by the court of a single qāḍī, who was the judge of the facts as well as the law, although on difficult legal issues he might seek the advice of a professional jurist, or muftī. There was no hierarchy of courts and no organized system of appeals. Through his clerk (kātib) the qāḍī controlled his court procedure, which was normally characterized by a lack of ceremony or sophistication. Legal representation was not unknown, but the parties would usually appear in person and address their pleas orally to the qāḍī.

      The first task of the qāḍī was to decide which party bore the burden of proof. This was not necessarily the party who brought the suit, but was the party whose contention was contrary to the initial legal presumption attaching to the case. In the case of an alleged criminal offense, for example, the presumption is the innocence of the accused, and in a suit for debt the presumption is that the alleged debtor is free from debt. Hence the burden of proof would rest upon the prosecution in the first case and upon the claiming creditor in the second. This burden of proof might, of course, shift between the parties several times in the course of the same suit, as, for example, where an alleged debtor pleads a counterclaim against the creditor.

      The standard of proof required, whether on an initial, intermediate or final issue, was a rigid one and basically the same in both criminal and civil cases. Failing a confession or admission by the defendant, the plaintiff or prosecutor was required to produce two witnesses to testify orally to their direct knowledge of the truth of his contention. Written evidence and circumstantial evidence, even of the most compelling kind, were normally inadmissible. Moreover, the oral testimony ( shahādah) had usually to be given by two male, adult Muslims of established integrity or character. In certain cases, however, the testimony of women was acceptable (two women being required in place of one man), and in most claims of property the plaintiff could satisfy the burden of proof by one witness and his own solemn oath as to the truth of his claim.

      If the plaintiff or prosecutor produced the required degree of proof, judgment would be given in his favour. If he failed to produce any substantial evidence at all, judgment would be given for the defendant. If he produced some evidence, but the evidence did not fulfill the strict requirements of shahādah, the defendant would be offered the oath of denial. Properly sworn this oath would secure judgment in his favour; but if he refused it, judgment would be given for the plaintiff, provided, in some cases, that the latter himself would swear an oath.

      In sum, the traditional system of procedure was largely self-operating. After his initial decision as to the incidence of the burden of proof, the qāḍī merely presided over the predetermined process of the law: witnesses were or were not produced, the oath was or was not administered and sworn, and the verdict followed automatically.

Law in contemporary Islām

The scope of Sharīʿah law and the mode of its administration

      During the 19th century the impact of Western civilization upon Muslim society brought about radical changes in the fields of civil and commercial transactions and criminal law. In these matters the Sharīʿah courts were felt to be wholly out of touch with the needs of the time, not only because of their system of procedure and evidence but also because of the substance of the Sharīʿah doctrine, which they were bound to apply.

      As a result, the criminal and general civil law of the Sharīʿah was abandoned in most Muslim countries and replaced by new codes based upon European models with a new system of secular tribunals to apply them. Thus, with the notable exception of the Arabian peninsula, where the Sharīʿah is still formally applied in its entirety, the application of Sharīʿah law in Islām has been broadly confined, from the beginning of the 20th century, to family law, including the law of succession at death and the particular institution of waqf endowments.

      Nor, even within this circumscribed sphere, is Sharīʿah law today applied in the traditional manner. Throughout the Middle East generally Sharīʿah family law is now expressed in the form of modern codes, and it is only in the absence of a specific relevant provision of the code that recourse is had to the traditionally authoritative legal manuals. In India and Pakistan much of the family law is now embodied in statutory legislation, and since the law is there administered as a case-law system, the authority of judicial decisions has superseded that of the legal manuals.

      In most countries, too, the court system has been, or is being, reorganized to include, for instance, the provision of appellate jurisdictions. In Egypt and Tunisia the Sharīʿah courts, as a separate entity, have been abolished, and Sharīʿah law is now administered through a unified system of national courts. In India (Indian law), and, since partition, in Pakistan it has always been the case that Sharīʿah law has been applied by the same courts that apply the general civil and criminal law.

      Finally, in many countries, special codes have been enacted to regulate the procedure and evidence of the courts that today apply Sharīʿah law. In the Middle East documentary and circumstantial evidence are now generally admissible; witnesses are put on oath and may be cross-examined, and the traditional rule that evidence is only brought by one side and that the other side, in suitable circumstances, takes the oath of denial has largely broken down. In sum, the court has a much wider discretion in assessing the weight of the evidence than it had under the traditional system of evidence. In India and Pakistan the courts apply the same rules of evidence to cases of Islāmic law as they do to civil cases generally. The system is basically English law, codified in the Indian Evidence Act, 1872.

Reform of Sharīʿah law

      Traditional Islāmic family law reflected to a large extent the patriarchal scheme of Arabian tribal society in the early centuries of Islām. Not unnaturally certain institutions and standards of that law were felt to be out of line with the circumstances of Muslim society in the 20th century, particularly in urban areas where tribal ties had disintegrated and movements for the emancipation of women had arisen. At first this situation seemed to create the same apparent impasse between the changing circumstances of modern life and an allegedly immutable law that had caused the adoption of Western codes in civil and criminal matters. Hence, the only solution that seemed possible to Turkey in 1926 was the total abandonment of the Sharīʿah and the adoption of Swiss family law in its place. No other Muslim country, however, has as yet followed this example. Instead, traditional Sharīʿah law has been adapted in a variety of ways to meet present social needs.

      From the outset the dominating issue in the Middle East has been the question of the juristic basis of reforms—i.e., granted their social desirability, their justification in terms of Islāmic jurisprudential theory, so that the reforms appear as a new, but legitimate, version of the Sharīʿah.

      In the early stages of the reform movement, the doctrine of taqlīd (unquestioning acceptance) was still formally observed and the juristic basis of reform lay in the doctrine of siyāsah, or “government,” which allows the political authority (who, of course, has no legislative power in the real sense of the term) to make administrative regulations of two principal types.

      The first type concerns procedure and evidence and restricts the jurisdiction of the Sharīʿah courts in the sense that they are instructed not to entertain cases that do not fulfill defined evidential requirements. Thus, an Egyptian law was enacted in 1931 that no disputed claim of marriage was to be entertained where the marriage could not be proved by an official certificate of registration, and no such certificate could be issued if the bride was less than 16 or the bridegroom less than 18 years of age at the time of the contract. Accordingly the marriage of a minor contracted by the guardian was still perfectly valid but would not, if disputed, be the subject of judicial relief from the courts. In theory the doctrine of the traditional authorities was not contradicted, but in practice an attempt had been made to abolish the institution of child marriage. The second type of administrative regulation was a directive to the courts as to which particular rule among existing variants they were to apply. This directive allowed the political authority to choose from the views of the different schools and jurists the opinion that was deemed best suited to present social circumstances. For example, the traditional Ḥanafī law in force in Egypt did not allow a wife to petition for divorce on the ground of any matrimonial offense committed by the husband, a situation that caused great hardship to abandoned or ill-treated wives. Mālikī law, however, recognizes the wife's right to judicial dissolution of her marriage on grounds such as the husband's cruelty, failure to provide maintenance and support, and desertion. Accordingly, an Egyptian law of 1920 codified the Mālikī law as the law henceforth to be applied by the Sharīʿah courts.

      By way of comparison, reform in the matters of child marriage and divorce was effected in the Indian subcontinent by statutory enactments that directly superseded the traditional Ḥanafī law. The Child Marriage Restraint Act, 1929, prohibited the marriage of girls below the age of 14 and boys below the age of 16 under pain of penalties; while the Dissolution of Muslim Marriages Act, 1939, modelled on the English Matrimonial Causes Acts, allowed a Ḥanafī wife to obtain judicial divorce on the standard grounds of cruelty, desertion, failure to maintain, etc.

      In the Middle East, by the 1950s, the potential for legal reform under the principle of siyāsah had been exhausted. Since that time the basic doctrine of taqlīd has been challenged to an ever-increasing degree. On many points the law recorded in the medieval manuals, insofar as it represents the interpretations placed by the early jurists upon the Qurʾān and the sunnah (sunna), has been held no longer to have a paramount and exclusive authority. Contemporary jurisprudence has claimed the right to renounce those interpretations and to interpret for itself, independently and afresh in the light of modern social circumstances, the original texts of divine revelation: in short to reopen the door of ijtihād that had been in theory closed since the 10th century.

      The developing use of ijtihād as a means of legal reform may be seen through a comparison of the terms of the Syrian law of Personal Status (1953) with those of the Tunisian Law of Personal Status (1957) in relation to the two subjects of polygamy and divorce by repudiation (ṭalāĪ).

      As regards polygamy the Syrian (Syria) reformers argued that the Qurʾān itself urges husbands not to take additional wives unless they are financially able to make proper provision for their maintenance and support. Classical jurists had construed this verse as a moral exhortation binding only on the husband's conscience. But the Syrian reformers maintained that it should be regarded as a positive legal condition precedent to the exercise of polygamy and enforced as such by the courts. This novel interpretation was then coupled with a normal administrative regulation that required the due registration of marriages after the permission of the court to marry had been obtained. The Syrian Law accordingly enacts: “The qāḍī may withhold permission for a man who is already married to marry a second wife, where it is established that he is not in a position to support them both.” Far more extreme, however, is the approach of the Tunisian reformers. They argued that, in addition to a husband's financial ability to support a plurality of wives, the Qurʾān also required that co-wives should be treated with complete impartiality. This Qurʾānic injunction should also be construed, not simply as a moral exhortation, but as a legal condition precedent to polygamy, in the sense that no second marriage should be permissible unless and until adequate evidence was forthcoming that the wives would in fact be treated impartially. But under modern social and economic conditions such impartial treatment was a practical impossibility. And since the essential condition for polygamy could not be fulfilled the Tunisian Law briefly declares: “Polygamy is prohibited.”

      With regard to ṭalāq the Syrian law provided that a wife who had been repudiated without just cause might be awarded compensation by the court from her former husband to the maximum extent of one year's maintenance. The reform was once again represented as giving practical effect to certain Qurʾānic verses that had been generally regarded by traditional jurisprudence as moral rather than legally enforceable injunctions—namely, those verses that enjoin husbands to “make a fair provision” for repudiated wives and to “retain wives with kindness or release them with consideration.” The effect of the Syrian law, then, is to subject the husband's motive for repudiation to the scrutiny of the court and to penalize him, albeit to a limited extent, for abuse of his power. Once again, however, the Tunisian ijtihād concerning repudiation is far more radical. Here the reformers argued that the Qurʾān orders the appointment of arbitrators in the event of discord between husband and wife. Clearly a pronouncement of repudiation by a husband indicated a state of discord between the spouses. Equally clearly the official courts were best suited to undertake the function of arbitration that then becomes necessary according to the Qurʾān. It is on this broad ground that the Tunisian law abolishes the right of a husband to repudiate his wife extrajudicially and enacts that: “Divorce outside a court of law is without legal effect.” Although the court must dissolve the marriage if the husband persists in his repudiation, it has an unlimited power to grant the wife compensation for any damage she has sustained from the divorce—although in practice this power has so far been used most sparingly. In regard to polygamy and ṭalāĪ therefore, Tunisia has achieved by reinterpretation of the Qurʾān reforms hardly less radical than those effected in Turkey some 30 years previously by the adoption of the Swiss Civil Code.

      In Pakistan a new interpretation of the Qurʾān and sunnah was the declared basis of the reforms introduced by the Muslim Family Laws Ordinance of 1961, although the provisions of the Ordinance in relation to polygamy and ṭalāĪ are much less radical than the corresponding Middle Eastern reforms, since a second marriage is simply made dependent upon the consent of an Arbitration Council and the effect of a husband's repudiation is merely suspended for a period of three months to afford opportunity for reconciliation.

      Judicial decisions in Pakistan have also unequivocally endorsed the right of independent interpretation of the Qurʾān. For example, in Khurshīd Bībī v. Muḥammad Amīn (1967) the Supreme Court held that a Muslim wife could as a right obtain a divorce simply by payment of suitable compensation to her husband. This decision was based on the Court's interpretation of a relevant Qurʾānic verse. But under traditional Sharīʿah law this form of divorce, known as khulʿ, whereby a wife pays for her release, is a contract between the spouses and as such entirely dependent upon the husband's free consent.

      These are but a few examples of the many far-reaching changes that have been effected in the Islāmic family law. But the whole process of legal reform as it has so far developed still involves great problems of principle and practice. A hard core of traditionalist opinion still adamantly rejects the validity of the process of reinterpretation of the basic texts of divine revelation. The traditionalists argue that the texts are merely being manipulated to yield the meaning that suits the preconceived purposes of the reformers, and that therefore, contrary to fundamental Islāmic ideology, it is social desirability and not the will of Allāh that is the ultimate determinant of the law.

      As regards the practical effect of legal reform, there exists in many Muslim countries a deep social gulf between a Westernized and modernist minority and the conservative mass of the population. Reforms that aim at satisfying the standards of progressive urban society have little significance for the traditionalist communities of rural areas or for the Mulsim fundamentalists, whose geographical and social distribution crosses all apparent boundaries. It is also often the case that the qāḍī (qadi)s, through their background and training, are not wholly sympathetic with the purposes of the modernist legislators—an attitude often reflected in their interpretations of the new codes.

      Such problems are, of course, inevitable in the transitional stage of social evolution in which Islām finds itself. But the one supreme achievement of jurisprudence over the past few decades has been the emergence of a functional approach to the question of the role of law in society. Jurisprudence has discarded the introspective and idealistic attitude that the doctrine of taqlīd had imposed upon it since early medieval times and now sees its task to be the solution of the problems of contemporary society. It has emerged from a protracted period of stagnation to adopt again the attitude of the earliest Muslim jurists, whose aim was to relate the dictates of the divine will to their own social environment. It is this attitude alone that has ensured the survival of the Sharīʿah in modern times as a practical system of law and that alone provides its inspiration for the future.

Noel James Coulson

Additional Reading

A general survey of the Islāmic legal system, covering its historical development, jurisprudential theory, and the most important spheres of the substantive law, is contained in Joseph Schacht, An Introduction to Islamic Law (1964); James N.D. Anderson, Islamic Law in the Modern World (1959, reprinted 1975); and Noel J. Coulson, History of Islamic Law (1964, reprinted 1971). The reader is referred to the bibliographies of these books, particularly for the numerous articles written by James N.D. Anderson on developments in the law. Joseph Schacht, Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence (1950, reissued with corrections and additions, 1967), is a fundamental work of modern research on the early development of legal theory written by the pioneer scholar of this subject. A sound analysis of traditional legal theory is presented in Abdur Rahim, Muhammadan Jurisprudence (1911, reprinted 1981); and in The Philosophy of Jurisprudence in Islam, (1961), an Eng. trans. by Farmat J. Ziadeh of the Arabic text of an outstanding Muslim jurist, Subhi Mahmassani. Majid Khadduri and Herbert J. Liebesny (eds.), Law in the Middle East (1955), includes chapters by Muslim scholars and Western Orientalists on the various spheres of substantive Islāmic law, traditional and modern. Asaf A.A. Fyzee, Outlines of Muhammadan Law, 4th ed. (1974), is a standard text dealing with Islāmic law as it is applied in India and Pakistan. Norman Anderson, Law Reform in the Muslim World (1976), is a comparative study of the history, philosophy, and achievements of legal reform. The Encyclopaedia of Islam (1913–42; new ed., 1960– ), contains numerous articles on individual legal topics.

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