Sharia¹ law is the set of rules and regulations set up in Muslim countries by its rulers based on the teachings of the Qur’an and hadith. In this article we will be looking at these following areas:

SOURCES

In Islam all human actions can be split essentially into two different sections, permitted and non permitted. This means that anything that does not appear on one list will be on the other². These sections can be divided down further in to 5 sections, those being: WAJIB; obligatory, MANDUB; preferable,MUBAH; permissible, HARAM; forbidden, MAKRUH; abominable. This list is what is known as Sharia law, which to Muslims is God’s law, and so deals with what God expects from his creation. To find out what action goes in to which list Muslims refer to the Qur’an³ and the sayings or actions of the Prophet Muhammad which is derived from the Hadith⁴. A more indepth look in to Hadith will be given latter on. These two sources are referred to as “the texts” and are the primary source of Islamic law. All other sources of Islamic law are created by human effort in there own interpretation of the sacred texts to derive new laws that are at least non inconsistent with the teachings of “the texts”. The reason for this is that Islam is seen by its followers as not being just a religion but being a way of life, and as such from a legal point of view Muslims view the Qur'an is seen as both a religious book and a book of laws. The hadith are used to break down initial laws in the Qur'an in to areas of application, punishments and other areas of jurispondance. The Hadith is also seen as the way people should emulate the way they live so as to be closest to God. Extremes of this can be found in places like Saudi Arabia where shops have to close down for the 5 daily prayers.

SHARIA AND QURANIC?

One of the biggest mistakes made in peoples views about sharia law is that they view sharia law as being the same a Qur’anic law. This is done by both Muslim’s and non Muslim’s and is actually not true. A lot of the laws in Sharia law are things that fit within the frame work of the teachings of the Qur’an and Hadith but it is not commanded by God and so is not compulsory except under the laws of that country.

To Muslim’s Qur’anic law is some thing that must be followed as otherwise they will be going against God’s word. For Qur’anic law there is generally no punishment given as the person has committed a crime against God and God is the one who will decide if that person should be punished or not. For example if someone only prays twice a day instead of five times then the only punishment they will receive is that which Muslims believe God will give them. Though it has to be mentioned that there are Quranic laws in the Qur'an that do give punishments, these all deal with the impact on the community in some way or the other. On the other hand Sharia law is mainly derived from man made effort and is more about laws effecting the ummah⁵ and civil laws. For example: A Muslim cleric issues a Fatwa⁶ that says in the interest of public safety all people who rides bikes must wear safety helmets and pads on their elbows and knees. This Law would be Sharia as it fits the teachings of the Qur’an and hadith, in this case the preserving and protecting of human life from possible death and harm. This means that a Muslim leader can say that this law is sharia based but if some one does not choose to follow it then it is not a sin as it’s not a Qur’anic law as the Qur’an does not tell you to do or not to do this act. So a person choosing not to do this would face a punishment of the government as there crime is against the community and its laws but would not be facing a further punishment of God. What this means is that whilst all Qur’anic law is Sharia law, not all sharia law is Qur’anic law.

In some cases something may be found that a crime can be both against God and the community at the same time. Adultery is one of them for example. In the Qur’an it says that Adultery is a sin and some thing that God will punish people for, it also says that who ever is found to be committing adultery will be lashed 100 times. This is sourced from a verse in the Qur'an that says: The woman and the man guilty of adultery or fornication,- flog each of them with a hundred stripes: Let not compassion move you in their case, in a matter prescribed by Allah, if ye believe in Allah and the Last Day: and let a party of the Believers witness their punishment⁷. Before moving on to the whole Islamic perspective it is important to point out that the punishment for Adultery and fornication is not due to breaking the right of God (i.e. an article of faith) but rather the punishment is for breaking the public’s right. Islamic community is very strict on its moral frame work and so if two people commit adultery in secret, they have broken one of God's laws but when it becomes public knowledge they have broken Gods laws and the rights of the moral community. It is for the act becoming public knowledge that they are being punished, either through witnesses or self confession. In either case they will have to face God with what they have done on the day of the resurrection. The first thing that needs to be looked at here regarding adultery and fornication is what constitutes adultery or fornication in Islam to be viable for punishment in the Qur'an in the above ayah and what evidence is needed. There are only two types of evidence for adultery in Islam which are confession and four male witnesses. In the case of a confession the guilty person has to confess four times. The first three confessions are ignored and if he says it a fourth time, then retracts his statement then without physical evidence, it is deemed as no evidence and so is free from punishment. The confession has to be given in exact details using a mix of metaphors and basic facts as Islam only sees the actual sexual penetration of a mans penis into a women’s vagina to be punishable for Zina. The reason for there to be four confessions is because in the hadith a man came to the Prophet Muhammad and confessed to adultery, but each time the Prophet turned away from him, until the fourth time, only then did the Prophet question him. It is also related in the hadith that there must be no doubt that the guilty person has committed adultery. The Hadith reads;

In another hadith it is reported that:

This highlights that even when a person says that they have committed adultery or fornication that the person is to be questioned to make sure that they have actually performed the act, and that they know exactly what it is they are saying they did. If someone has confessed and then withdraws there confession then they can not be charged as there is no longer any evidence unless there are witnesses.

Islamic law prescribes that their should be four male witnesses to adultery and fornication which should fit the following requirements:

Normally in Islamic law only two witnesses are required but in the case of Adultery and fornication there must be at least four. The primary reason for all of this is to protect women from false charges. The reason for male witnesses is because generally women have more freedom to enter other people’s homes and private rooms in a Muslim community and so it acts as further protection on people’s privacy. This is further backed up by the fact that a few ayahs after it is prescribed for four witnesses on adultery and fornication the Qur'an goes onto say:

As for all the other requirements, well that’s because this particular law is one that is to act as a preventive measure and not one that should be heavily enforced. The point is to give an idea of the seriousness of committing adultery and fornication in Gods eyes. This is backed up by a hadith⁹ that says it is better for a judge to let a guilty person go than to punish a innocent person, regardless if they are charged or not they will still be accountable to God and so they will get there dues. Also several scholars also derived a school of thought that it is preferable for a person who witnesses an act of zina not to report it, and instead to cover the shortcoming of others while at the
same time advising them to change their behaviour. This is based on a hadith that says:

Naturally with the call of four witnesses it is virtually impossible to be prosecuted for the crime of adultery and fornication unless the people committing it has absolutely no regard for the moral grounds of the society they live in, which as said before is what the punishment is for.

To further secure women’s safety from false claims the Qur'an makes the junction that anyone who accuses a women of adultery or fornication without the above requirements of witnesses and evidence then they are punishable to 70 lashes as with out proof they should keep things to themselves¹⁰.

The only time when four witnesses are not required and the punishment for false accusations is not given is when a man or a woman accuse there spouse of having an extra marital affair. In these circumstances if there is no witnesses the accuser must swear three times that the accused has committed a illicit act and then a fourth oath that if they are lying then God will punish them for it, and the accused is instantly seen as being guilty unless the accused then makes the same oath but swearing that they have not performed any illicit acts. This makes the trial redundant and the two people can either work out there differences or get divorced and it is left in Gods hands to deliver punishment in this life or the next.

This brings us up to the last area of evidence which is pregnancy out side of marriage. Islam does not see pregnancy as anything other than circumstantial evidence that at best can proof that a women has had contact with seminal fluid and can never prove adultery or fornication. There are two hadith relating to this which read:

And:

These cases highlight the fact that pregnancy can never in its self be proof for zina and that other evidence is needed along side pregnancy to implicate someone.

Both aspects of the above are Qur’anic law
and as such must be found within sharia law.

APPLICATION

During the first 300 years after the Prophet Muhammad’s death it became clear that in some cases of Islamic worship there was several ways of doing a process that was valid in the interpretation of the texts. This led to the rise of Fiqh¹¹. The reason for this was because some times the Prophet Muhammad did some thing one way and at an other time he might do it another way. For example some times he prayed with his arms down his sides, other times he had his hands crossed on his chest. Both of these actions then are valid in prayer and so some people preferred one method over the other. This ended up with different schools of thought on Islamic jurisprudence where different groups did things in different ways but all viewed each others ways as allowed but not as good as there own.

The Major divide in Islamic law is that between Sunni’s and Shia. Just after the Prophet Muhammad’s death there was a disagreement between who should be the success of the Islamic state. On the one side people argued that the candidate should be the one seen as the best for command and on the other side it was viewed that it should progress through the bloodline of the Prophet Muhammad to his son. It was put to the vote and the winning side was the one who wanted the best candidate to lead the Islamic state. This group became the sunni’s, the losing faction became the Shia. Over the years the split has grown wider with each side having there own Hadith and teachings. Even amongst these groups there are differences in schools of thought. For example in the Sunni group there are several different schools of thought that range from the most liberal, being the Hanafi School, while the Hanbali School is extremely conservative rejecting any statement not firmly based on the Koran or Hadith. Then there are differences in what level these laws are applied, for example Turkey has a government that regards Islam as a matter of private religious practice whilst Islamic States such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan are extremely fundamental with all its laws. These different schools of though all deal with three different types of crime that make up the penal laws.

HADITH PURPOSE AND APPLICATION

The reason for the hadith was so that there was a set of volumes that contained guidance on how to implement the Qur’an in to your life, for example by showing what was permissible and what was not permissible. The main collections of Hadith in date compiled order are:

The earliest one was compiled in 870 or 256 years after Hijrah¹² and the latest was compiled in 915 or 303 years after Hijrah. In each compilation the compilers had to be critical about what they put in and what they left out as even the earliest one was written over 200 years after the Prophet Muhammad had died, and so had to be sourced from word and mouth and what was written down by people of that time. For example Bukhari had to examine around 600,000 traditions to build his compilation, of which he ended up using only 7,397. Each tradition was given a rating which ranged from very strong to very weak, this was based upon many different factors such as the number of witnesses to that statement from different sources, the character of the person(s) who observed it, if the person(s) who observed it was in the right place at the right time to have been able to be around the Prophet to hear said words, the chain of narration (narrator hears hadith passes it on to next person and so on, very strong hadith must have a complete chain of narration from the time the Prophet Muhammad said or did it, to the time the compilation was made), rather the narration fits within the guidance of the Qur’an etc.

The hadith on its own is very useful and extremely dangerous at the same time; People can put to much emphasis on the hadith and not enough on the Qur’an even thoughing the hadith should never actually be taken on its own and should always be applied with in the teachings of the Qur’an. A less dangerous example would be at weddings. There is a hadith that mentions that when two people get married they should get married with in the shade of the Qur’an, and so you get these massive lavish weddings where the parents spend most of there savings to have the biggest wedding possible, with load music and dancers, so much food that most of it goes in the bin and at the end of it all they are led out with some holding a Qur’an over there head. Well they are following the hadith to the letter but not in the way it means. If you attach that hadith to what the Qur’an teaches you find out that it means weddings should be simple affairs with out a lot of fuss, by all means have a party but not a massive bankruptcy causing party as the money can go towards more important things, like giving them a good start in there new marriage. As this shows it is easy to take a hadith away from its true context if you do not put a little thought or research in to it. The same applies here to the Qur'an, due to the Qur'ans verse structure and the structure of the hadith it is very easy for someone to twist something to their view, indirectly or directly. Humanbeings over the ages have proe that they can be infinitely creative when it comes to furthering his own agenda, and this can be felt through out history and can be observed in all things including religions. Just like any other religion the same can be found in Islam, for example Islam explicitly forbids interest, but there still are some "Muslims" who try to justify interest and claim it is not forbidden.

The other problem with hadith is that though the best has been done to compile the hadith as accurately as possible it still has errors in it. Some hadith do contradict one and another and others do not really relate to the Qur’an. For example in the first hadith it is reported that the prophet said to his people shortly before his death:

Yet in another hadith the prophet commands his people quite the opposite:

(Sahih Moslim )

So while the hadith is an important source for Muslims it should only be used as a tool and not as a 100% reliable source.

There are nearly 100 different branchs of study in the science of hadith, which include the science of Asma'ul Rijal (the science of study of the life-history of 500,000 narrators), the science of Gharib al-hadith (the study of the linguistic origins of the difficult words used in ahadith), the science of Mustalih al-Hadith (the science of classifying a hadith as authentic or weak) which all aim to improve the level of accuracy within the hadith.

Sometimes something within the hadith has been around so long that its just excepted as the norm and no real investigation has been done on it or even seen as needed, such as Aisha’s age at the time of her marriage to the Prophet Muhammad and consummation¹³ due to one hadith, whilst several other stronger hadith show otherwise in a non direct way.

PENAL LAWS

The penal laws are as follows :

WHERE THINGS GO WRONG

During the last 1400 years many laws have been introduced that are not actually Islamic as it does not follow either Qur’anic law or fits with any hadith, many been implemented on the basis of cultural practice. An classic example of how things can go wrong would be about drinking alcohol. The Qur’an prohibits the taking of all intoxicants including alcohol. Drinking alcohol is regarded as a sin in Islam as it goes against the commandments of the Qur’an and the hadith, but here is the interesting bit, no where in the entire Qur’an or hadith does it give an actual penalty for the sin of drinking alcohol. The penalty for drinking is one that is left to God to decide in either this life or the hereafter, but during the rein of the caliphate¹⁶ Umar there was a Muslim man who when drunk used to shout out libel about the state. Umar gathered a group of scholars and they decided to punish the guy with 40 lashes of the whip due to his libel. Nothing was mentioned about his being drunk. Unfortunately in Muslims countries this has now been added as the law against people getting drunk regardless if they are speaking untruth about the government due to people not researching the full explanation for the punishment given in that example, as most people would go as far as “The sharia says that penalty for drinking alcohol is 40 lashes” and not look at the legal history behind that conclusion and so give a false sentence.

Sharia law is designed to protect life, religion, property, family and sanity and as such if a particular law imposes on one of these issues then it may be suspended temporarily. Forcing the law on to some one when it intervenes one of these areas would be a violation of Qur’anic law and so would be a sin and a crime under this punishable from both the state and God. A few years ago in the papers in was reported that a girls school in Saudi Arabia had caught fire and the "mutaween¹⁷" police had not let the students out unless they had their head scarf’s on, this resulted in the death of 15 girls. This caused a massive amount of bad publicity against Islam and sharia law that is still mentioned today. What is not known and is not reported is that such action by the mutaween" police was against Qur’anic law and under Qur’anic law any such injury or death that resulted in the refusal to let them girls out without headscarf would have led to charges of manslaughter or abuse and so entitled the parents to charge those responcible for there crime and receive compensation. Unfortunately due to the lack of understanding between the difference in Sharia and Qur’anic law this was lost not on just the western media but also to the Muslim media and population them selves, and perhaps more importantly on the Saudi government its self.