page_title: Sharia
section_title: Historical origins
hierarchical_section_title: Sharia / Historical origins
context_page_description: Sharia, Islamic law, or redundantly Sharia law, is a religious law forming part of the Islamic tradition. It is derived from the religious precepts of Islam, particularly the Quran and the hadith. In Arabic, the term sharīʿah refers to God's immutable divine law and is contrasted with fiqh, which refers to its human scholarly interpretations. The manner of its application in modern times has been a subject of dispute between Muslim fundamentalists and modernists.
  Traditional theory of Islamic jurisprudence recognizes four sources of Sharia: the Quran, sunnah, qiyas, and ijma. Different legal schools—of which the most prominent are Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi'i, Hanbali and Jafari—developed methodologies for deriving Sharia rulings from scriptural sources using a process known as ijtihad. Traditional jurisprudence distinguishes two principal branches of law, ʿibādāt and muʿāmalāt, which together comprise a wide range of topics. Its rulings are concerned with ethical standards as much as with legal norms, assigning actions to one of five categories: mandatory, recommended, neutral, abhorred, and prohibited.
context_section_description: According to the traditional Muslim view, the major precepts of Sharia were passed down directly from the Islamic prophet Muhammad without  "historical development," and the emergence of Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) also goes back to the lifetime of Muhammad. In this view, his companions and followers took what he did and approved of as a model (sunnah) and transmitted this information to the succeeding generations in the form of hadith. These reports led first to informal discussion and then systematic legal thought, articulated with greatest success in the eighth and ninth centuries by the master jurists Abu Hanifah, Malik ibn Anas, Al-Shafi‘i, and Ahmad ibn Hanbal, who are viewed as the founders of the Hanafi, Maliki, Shafiʿi, and Hanbali legal schools (madhhabs) of Sunni jurisprudence.
  Modern historians have presented alternative theories of the formation of fiqh. At first Western scholars accepted the general outlines of the traditional account. In the late 19th century, an influential revisionist hypothesis was advanced by Ignac Goldziher and elaborated by Joseph Schacht in the mid-20th century. Schacht and other scholars argued that having conquered much more populous agricultural and urban societies with already existing laws and legal needs unknown to the desert-dwelling conquerors, 
  the initial Muslim efforts to formulate legal norms
  regarded the Quran and Muhammad's hadiths as just one sources of law, with jurist personal opinions, the legal practice of conquered peoples, and the decrees and decisions of the caliphs also being valid sources.  At least one source (historian Tom Holland) has argued that the strong scholarly tradition of Mobad among the conquered Zoroastrians of Persia and rabbis among the conquered Jews influenced the law of their largely illiterate warrior conquerors; and that this can explain such issues as why the Quran mentions only three prayers (24:58) while Muslims pray five times a day (Zoroastrians prayed five times a day) and why the Quran commands adulterers be lashed, while Sharia calls for their execution by stoning (Deuteronomy 22:21 of the Jewish Torah calls for stoning to death of women who have been found to have had sex before marriage).
  According to this theory, most canonical hadiths did not originate with Muhammad but were actually created at a later date, despite the efforts of hadith scholars to weed out fabrications.
  After it became accepted that legal norms must be formally grounded in scriptural sources, proponents of rules of jurisprudence supported by the hadith would extend the chains of transmission of the hadith back to Muhammad's companions. In his view, the real architect of Islamic jurisprudence was Al-Shafi‘i (d. 820 CE/204 AH), who formulated this idea (that legal norms must be formally grounded in scriptural sources) and other elements of classical legal theory in his work al-risala, but who was preceded by a body of Islamic law not based on primacy of Muhammad's hadiths.
  While the origin of hadith remains a subject of scholarly controversy, this theory (of Goldziher and Schacht) has given rise to objections, and modern historians generally adopt more cautious, intermediate positions,  
  and it is generally accepted that early Islamic jurisprudence developed out of a combination of administrative and popular practices shaped by the religious and ethical precepts of Islam. It continued some aspects of pre-Islamic laws and customs of the lands that fell under Muslim rule in the aftermath of the early conquests and modified other aspects, aiming to meet the practical need of establishing Islamic norms of behavior and adjudicating disputes arising in the early Muslim communities. Juristic thought gradually developed in study circles, where independent scholars met to learn from a local master and discuss religious topics. At first, these circles were fluid in their membership, but with time distinct regional legal schools crystallized around shared sets of methodological principles. As the boundaries of the schools became clearly delineated, the authority of their
caption: Juristic exchange between Abu Dawood and Ibn Hanbal. One of the oldest literary manuscripts of the Islamic world, dated October 879.
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