This article is about Islamic religious law. For the fictional character in One Thousand and One Nights see Shahryar.
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Sharia (Arabic: شريعة transliteration: Šarī'ah) is the dynamic body of Islamic religious law. The term means "way" or "path to the water source"; it is the legal framework within which the public and some private aspects of life are regulated for those living in a legal system based on Muslim principles of jurisprudence.
Sharia deals with many aspects of day-to-day life, including politics, economics, banking, business, contracts, family, sexuality, hygiene, and social issues.
There is no strictly static codified set of laws of sharia. Sharia is more of a system of devising laws, based on the Qur'an (the religious text of Islam), hadith (sayings of Muhammad pbuh), ijma, qiyas and centuries of debate, interpretation and precedent.
Before the 19th century, legal theory was considered the domain of the traditional legal schools of thought. Most Sunni Muslims follow Hanafi, Hanbali, Maliki or Shafii, while most Shia Muslims follow Twelvers (Hallaq 1997, Brown 1996, Aslan 2006).

Etymology
Mainstream Islam distinguishes between fiqh ("understanding of details"), which refers to the inferences drawn by scholars, and sharia, which refers to the principles that lie behind the fiqh. Scholars hope that fiqh and sharia are in harmony in any given case, but they cannot be sure.
obligatory
meritorious
permissible
reprehensible
forbidden
shahada
salat
zakat
sawm
hajj In the context of Islam
The formative period of Islamic jurisprudence stretches back to the time of the early Muslim communities. In this period, jurists were more concerned with pragmatic issues of authority and teaching than with theory.

History
During the 19th century the history of Islamic law took a sharp turn due to new challenges the Muslim world faced: the West had risen to a global power and colonized a large part of the world, including Muslim territories. Societies changed from the agricultural to the industrial stage. New social and political ideas emerged and social models slowly shifted from hierarchical towards egalitarian. The Ottoman Empire and the rest of the Muslim world were in decline, and calls for reform became louder. In Muslim countries, codified state law started replacing the role of scholarly legal opinion. Western countries sometimes inspired, sometimes pressured, and sometimes forced Muslim states to change their laws. Secularist movements pushed for laws deviating from the opinions of the Islamic legal scholars. Islamic legal scholarship remained the sole authority for guidance in matters of rituals, worship, and spirituality, while they lost authority to the state in other areas. The Muslim community became divided into groups reacting differently to the change. This division persists until the present day (Brown 1996, Hallaq 2001, Ramadan 2005, Aslan 2006, Safi 2003).

Secularists believe the law of the state should be based on secular principles, not on Islamic legal theory.
Traditionalists believe that the law of the state should be based on the traditional legal schools. However, traditional legal views are considered unacceptable by most modern Muslims, especially in areas like women's rights or slavery.
Salafis strive to follow Muhammad and his companions, tabiin (followers of the Companions), tabiut tabiin (followers of the tabiin) and those who follow these 3 generations. Modernity
There is tremendous variance in the interpretation and implementation of Islamic Law in Muslim societies today. Liberal movements within Islam have questioned the relevance and applicability of sharia from a variety of perspectives; Islamic feminism brings multiple points of view to the discussion. Several of the countries with the largest Muslim populations, including Indonesia, Bangladesh and Pakistan, have largely secular constitutions and laws, with only a few Islamic provisions in family law. Turkey has a constitution that is officially strongly secular. India and the Philippines are the only countries in the world which have separate Muslim civil laws, framed by Muslim Personal Law board, and wholly based on Sharia and the Code of Muslim Personal Laws of the Philippines. However, the criminal laws are uniform. Some controversial sharia laws favour Muslim men, including polygamy and rejection of alimony.
Most countries of the Middle East and North Africa maintain a dual system of secular courts and religious courts, in which the religious courts mainly regulate marriage and inheritance. Saudi Arabia and Iran maintain religious courts for all aspects of jurisprudence, and religious police assert social compliance. Laws derived from sharia are also applied in Afghanistan, Libya and Sudan. Some states in northern Nigeria have reintroduced Sharia courts.

Contemporary practice
Sharia law is divided into two main sections:
See mu`amalat laws according to five major schools of jurisprudence and The Majallah.

The acts of worship, or al-ibadat, these include:

• Ritual Purification (wudu)
  Prayers (salah)
  Fasts (sawm and Ramadan)
  Charities (zakat)
  Pilgrimage to Mecca (hajj)
  Human interaction, or al-mu'amalat, which includes:
  
  
  
  • Financial transactions
    Endowments
    Laws of inheritance
    Marriage, divorce, and child care
    Foods and drinks (including ritual slaughtering and hunting)
    Penal punishments
    Warfare and peace
    Judicial matters (including witnesses and forms of evidence) Topics of Islamic law
    
    
    Main article: Halal Dietary
    
    

    Main articles: Islamic marital jurisprudence and Talaq (Nikah) Marriage and divorce
    
    

    Main article: Hudud Penalties
    See also Islamic hygienical jurisprudence
    Practitioners of Islam are generally taught to follow some specific customs in their daily lives. Most of these customs can be traced back to Abrahamic traditions in Pre-Islamic Arabian society. Customs and behaviour
    
    

    Main articles: Eid, Eid ul-Fitr, and Eid ul-Adha Rituals
    
    

    Main articles: Hijab and Sartorial hijab Dress codes
    Under Sharia law non-Muslims may be subjected to Sharia Laws however it codifies the treatment of dhimmis in relation to the Muslim state and in cases of over-lapping jurisdiction. Dhimmis are distinctly second-class citizens in that they cannot serve in public office, cannot testify in court and must follow certain rules meant for living on Muslim land and under Muslim protection (such as paying the jizya). The jizya or tax is enforced on those who broke a treaty or attacked Muslim with no right (as a punishment) or required from those who ask for protection without enrolling in the army. The rules include privilege to practice their own religion, except for public demonstration of non-Muslim religious practices and the right to convert Muslims.
    The core component of treatment is the jizya, or tax specifically upon non-Muslims. The jizya originates in the Qur'an which says "Fight against those who believe not in Allah, nor in the Last Day, nor forbid that which has been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger and those who acknowledge not the religion of the truth among the people of the Scripture (Jews and Christians), until they pay the Jizyah with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued." The "Book" refers to the People of the Book, Jews and Christians, who don't follow their religion righteously, but the jizya was extended to all conquered non-Muslims. The jizya ultimately is less than the Zakah (money given to the poor and needy) and Sadaqah (charity) that Muslims give. In practice, this was rarely the case.
    
    Contemporary issues
    Many democrats, and several official institutions in democratic countries (as the European Court for Human Rights) are convinced that Sharia is incompatible with a democratic state. These incompatibilities have been clarified in several legal disputes.
    In 1998 the Turkish Constitutional Court banned and dissolved Turkey's Refah Party on the grounds that the "rules of sharia", which Refah sought to introduce, "were incompatible with the democratic regime," stating that "Democracy is the antithesis of sharia." On appeal by Refah the European Court of Human Rights determined that "sharia is incompatible with the fundamental principles of democracy"
    Several major, predominantly Muslim countries criticized the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) for its perceived failure to take into account the cultural and religious context of non-Western countries. Iran claimed that the UDHR was a "a secular understanding of the Judeo-Christian tradition", which could not be implemented by Muslims without trespassing the Islamic law. Therefore the Organization of the Islamic Conference adopted the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam, which diverges from the UDHR substantially, affirming Sharia as the sole source of human rights. This Declaration was severely criticized by the International Commission of Jurists for allegedly gravely threatening the inter-cultural consensus, introducing intolerable discrimination against non-Muslims and women, restricting fundamental rights and freedoms, and attacking the integrity and dignity of the human being.
    
    Democracy and human rights
    See also: Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy
    See also: Blasphemy laws of the Islamic Republic of Iran and Blasphemy laws of Pakistan
    Sharia does not allow freedom of speech on such matters as criticism of Muhammad. Such criticism is considered blasphemy against Muhammad. Many Muslims believe that if there is no freedom of speech, or if freedom of speech is very limited then people will learn to control what comes out of their mouths.
    
    Freedom of speech
    
    

    Main article: women in Islam Notes
    
    Ghamidi, Javed (2001). Mizan. Dar al-Ishraq. OCLC 52901690. 
    Human Rights and Islamic Law
    Ashk Dahlén (2003). Islamic Law, Epistemology and Modernity, Routledge. ISBN-13: 978-0415945295
    Laleh Bakhtiar and Kevin Reinhart (1996). Encyclopedia of Islamic Law: A Compendium of the Major Schools. Kazi Publications. ISBN 1567444989
    Muhammad ibn Idris al- Shafi'i (1993). Risala: Treatise on the Foundations of Islamic Jurisprudence. Islamic Texts Society. ISBN 0946621152
    Khaled Abou El Fadl 2003). Reasoning with God: Rationality and Thought in Islam. Oneworld. ISBN 1851683062
    Cemal Kafadar (1996). Between Two Worlds: The Construction of the Ottoman State. University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-20600-2
    Omid Safi (2003). Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender, and Pluralism. Oneworld Publications. ISBN 1-85168-316-X
    Mumisa, Michael (2002) Islamic Law: Theory & Interpretation. Amana Publications. ISBN 1-59008-010-6
    Daniel W. Brown (1996). Rethinking traditions in modern Islamic thought. Cambridge University Press, UK. ISBN 0-521-65394-0
    Human Rights Documents Archives
    Omar Shahin, The Muslim Family in Western Society: A Study in Islamic Law (English), Cloverdale Books, 2007. ISBN 978-1-929569-30-4
    Weiss, Bernard G. (2002). Studies in Islamic Legal Theory. Boston: Brill Academic publishers. ISBN 9004120661. 
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