Sharī’a in the Qur‘an: A Word Meaning “Law” or a Metaphor Evoking “Path”?

Abstract

The meanings of the term “sharī’a” have changed significantly over time. Although the connotations of sharī’a have shifted, there is a tendency, even by scholars, to invoke the term anachronistically. The shifting meanings of sharī’a have contributed in no small part to an increasingly politicized and rhetorically provocative debate, both within and outside of the Muslim world, regarding the contending roles of the modern state, positive law, political Islam, human rights, and Islamic religious values. Sharī’a (as a noun meaning “path”) appears only once in the Quran, where the Prophet Muhammad is instructed to follow God’s path. The word appears only a dozen times in the hadith (statements recounting the words and the actions of the Prophet), and it always is used to signify a path, and particularly a path to water. (The original meaning of “sharī’a” is thus analogous to “tao” in Taoism.) Within 200 years of the Prophet’s death, however, the metaphor of a path was converted into God’s perfect law, albeit knowable only to God. Human beings’ fallible attempts to understand God’s perfect law was known as “fiqh” (i.e., “jurisprudence”). Human beings struggle with fiqh; God alone knows sharī’a. This distinction between God’s sharī’a and human fiqh began to break down in the nineteenth century in large part resulting from the interventions by Europeans who brought their notions of written positive state law and codification into Muslim lands.

Although Muslim regimes did have positive laws (such as for crimes and contracts), they largely did not have positive laws governing religious matters. Under European pressure, the Ottoman Empire began a series of reforms during the second half of the nineteenth century that included the creation of “sharī’a courts.” In British India and Egypt (including the Sudan), the colonial power began to codify and apply “Muslim law”. The French colonial empire in Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Senegal, and Mauritania similarly worked to “civilize” and codify the droit musulman. In efforts to resist colonialism and imperialism, Muslim activists (largely beginning with Jamal al-Din al-Afghani) invoked religious identity and religious rhetoric as a means of rallying the native population against their colonial overseers. Thus Europeans encouraged the conflation of statutory law with religious law. The most recent evolution of sharī’a largely began in the 1970s (particularly during and after eventful year 1979), when the word (with its divine connotations) came to be used to describe positive law in modern Muslim-majority states. In 1979, the Ayatollah Khomeini came to power in Iran, the mujahidin of Afghanistan launched a war against the puppet Communist government, Pakistan began to enact sharia laws, and Muslim dissidents seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca. The Egyptian Constitution of 1971, for the first time, invoked sharī’a as a source of legislation, and the constitutional amendment of 1980 converted it into the source of legislation. Other states began to insert the word sharī’a into their own constitutions and statutes. Since 1984, but not before, Muslim-majority countries started attaching sharīa reservations to their ratification of human rights treaties. Thus there is no single meaning of the term “sharī’a”, but there are now powerful emotional and political connotations associated with its use – and abuse. Sharī’a has been transformed from a path, to God’s perfect law, to an invocation of identity against the Other.