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Islamic Law & the Modern World Essay

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Islam is the religion of the Muslims. It is a religion that constitutes the total submission of the Muslim to God. During this submission, it brings about peace, serenity, love and above all, justice. Shari’ah is “a line of conduct, a morality laid down by the accounts of the Islamic religion. It is based on the Quran and on the views of the prophet” (Jelloun 100). It is a law that governs the believer’s conducts and lifestyle. It regulates the believer on what to do and what not to do. The severity of the law in some Islamic societies, however, has drawn criticism and has made people from other religious sects wary of the religion itself. This is because we now live in a modernized society. Where people believe in liberties and human …show more content…

In the essence, it was the arrival of the prophet that reversed these laws and therefore people emulated his Sunnah. After his death, the laws were based on the Quran revelations and the compilations of the prophet’s sunnah, otherwise known as hadith. However, later developments surfaced; where a judge was not able to find a specific solution to a crime in the Quran and hadith, he would employ certain principles of reasoning as well as the public interests. Afterwards, the results of this kind of judgment were based on a consensus of jurists. As an attempt to define God’s law, the jury of individual scholars would result in a tentative conclusion termed zann (“Conjecture”). But where a conclusion became the subject of equal agreement by the qualified scholars, it became a certain (yaqin) and infallible expression of Allah’s law (Encyclopaedia). This is, if not a brief, how Shari’ah came into existence and it was by these means, the law was fixed and resistant to change even after the modernization and westernization of other societies and cultures. The Shari’ah law gains criticism in the way it regulates the people. This is due to the fact that the Shari’ah law is not merely a system of law, but it also regulates the code of behavior in both public and private aspects. This is where it differs with the western systems of law. Firstly the Shari’ah law regulates man’s relationship not only with

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