A scholar, the jurist faqih , is the primary interpreter of that law and produces fiqh. He or she there have been many female jurists is distinct from the judge qadi in the courthouse who implements it. It splits human activity into those which are obligatory, recommended, neutral, discouraged or forbidden haram.
In the early centuries of Islam, Muslim scholars devised processes for assessing the relative reliability of the thousands of hadith then in circulation. Those hadith considered most reliable were preserved in a number of collections.
It is this role of individual reason which enables Islamic law to be dynamic and adaptive to new situations. For example, prominent Persian jurist Abu Hamid al—Ghazali d. We see this in the development of different schools of thought. As a result, different schools madhhab of law developed in different regions, each offering slightly different conclusions about what God wanted Muslims to do in a given situation. While jurists disagreed with each other on particular issues, many recognised that difference of opinion ikthilaf was inevitable and indeed legitimate, as long as the basic principles of Islam were upheld.
For Muslims today, there is more plurality in Islamic law than ever. Suitably qualified jurists can issue fatwas, or statements of opinion, on particular matters of Muslim life. So Muslims, particularly those outside Muslim—majority countries, are under no compulsion to follow every fatwa issued by clerics. Access to religious knowledge is becoming democratized and globalised.
According to the traditional Muslim narrative, during the early years of Islam ijtihad was regularly undertaken by suitably qualified jurists. In the colonial period, Muslim reformists argued that if European imperialism was to be overthrown, ijtihad and Islamic law needed to be revived to help Muslims respond to the situation.
In a similar way, today some jurists are recognising the need for revived ijtihad. With social and technological change bringing about situations never before encountered by Muslims, some think a new fiqh is needed which specifically addresses the situation of Muslims in minority contexts, including in Britain.
Such scriptural punishments for these acts and indeed, in some cases even the very condemnation of them horrify people today. However, there are several important conditions that mitigate the severity of these punishments:.
For it is better for the authority to err in mercy than to err in punishment. Altogether, then, it seems that the hudud were intended to be harsh enough to ward Muslims off from committing the crimes, but with standards of proof high enough so that the stated punishments were rarely carried out.
They may have faced other punishments handed down by the judges, who could use their discretion to hand down punishments in line with the circumstances of the case at hand. Depending on the crime, those punishments could still have been severe. Many consider these rules to have been designed for a specific historical context and that they are inapplicable for the very different modern world.
In recent years there have been a number of surveys of British Muslim attitudes. These tend to show that British Muslims overwhelmingly feel a strong sense of belonging to Britain. But regarding Muslim attitudes to Islamic law, the polling questions are often very poorly worded and sensationalist, so we learn very little about their actual views, including on the specific issue of the introduction of the hudud punishments.
It may indicate anything from respondents feeling the question was too simplistic to answer adequately, to having given the topic little thought, to being confused or conflicted about the issue.
No doubt some will be thinking of the re—establishment of laws that promote socially conservative values. But others may mean specific changes to English family law, such as the legal recognition of Islamic religious marriage, which would be no bad thing see below.
As with the hudud, the reality is more complex. The particular example about testimony is subject to great debate and disagreement among modern Muslim scholars. Today, some Muslim scholars argue that it was uncommon for women to be involved in commercial transactions in early Islam; the stipulation for two women as witnesses was not a comment on their mental capacity but a reflection of their likely lack of expertise in such matters, with one being able to support the other.
Some Muslims will therefore see this stipulation as unnecessary in a modern world with much greater female education. In the face of non—Muslim assumptions about their oppression, increasingly many Muslim women in the West and beyond are describing their religion, at its origins, as one of female liberation.
This is well documented in a range of recent studies, such as by Shelina Janmohamed [16] and Philip Lewis and Sadek Hamid.
Of course we must be careful here. Moreover, undoubtedly there are clear differences between the rights of men and women in some areas of fiqh that offend the Western assumption that everyone should have identical rights. But they are controversial and are sometimes accused of gender discrimination. In certain circumstances, primarily business disputes, Muslims are able to settle their affairs under Islamic legal norms, via the English law rules on arbitration.
The Arbitration Act allows people in a dispute formally to agree to have their issue resolved by a third party of their choice, the arbitrator. For a number of years Muslims have been making use of this process through an organisation called the Muslim Arbitration Tribunal MAT , which settles commercial disputes following Islamic principles but in a way that conforms with English law.
The vast majority of people who use their services are women, and their primary activity is facilitating the granting of a religious divorce to Muslim women. Occasionally, when a Muslim woman seeks an end to her religious marriage nikah , her husband may refuse to agree to the divorce.
Ahmed pointed to women's rights as a key indicator of how widely interpretations of sharia law can differ. However, Ahmed noted that "mainstream Islam is literally saying these people don't represent us. Ahmed pointed to the Taliban's violent, and even deadly, treatment of women when they ruled in Afghanistan from to But he also referenced the group's recent statements that they will uphold women's rights under Islamic law.
Taliban in Afghanistan: What it means for US troop involvement and country's stability. Washington: Pelosi skeptical about Taliban treatment of women. The proof will be in the eating of the pudding, whether, in fact, they do mean it. In May, then-Afghan leaders blamed the Taliban for a bombing at a girl's school in Kabul that killed dozens.
The Taliban denied responsibility. Facebook Twitter Email. You can read all six articles in this Understanding Islam series on TheConversation. What Sharia means: 5 questions answered. Harsh punishments under Sharia are modern interpretations of an ancient tradition. Islamic Networks Group answers a series of commonly asked questions about Sharia in the U.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. Physical touch is a simple form of connecting to another person and holds significance for many cultures, especially at a person's final moments. But how does the Church determine what is a miracle? The jargon used to describe climate change can feel overwhelming and confusing to someone who isn't a climate scientist.
Here are some common terms translated to plain language. Expensive, militarized fire suppression led the U. Skip to main content. Admission back Apply. Give Now back.
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