For Muslims also...

For Muslims also, God as the supreme and transcendent Sovereign has revealed His Laws through His prophets. The Shari‘ah is the concrete embodiment of the Divine Will, and in its most universal sense it embraces the whole of creation; what we call laws of nature are “the Shari‘ah ” of various orders of corporeal reality. There is no distinction between the religious and secular realms, although the existence of non-Shari‘ite laws are recognized in practice, as we shall see later.

In the Islamic perspective, Divine Law is to be implemented to regulate society and the actions of its members rather than society dictating what laws should be. The injunctions of Divine Law are permanent, but the principles can also be applied to new circumstances as they arise. But the basic thesis is one of trying to make the human order conform to the Divine norm, not vice-versa.

To speak of the Shari‘ah as being simply the laws of the seventh century fixed in time and not relevant today would be like telling Christians that the injunctions of Christ to love one’s neighbor and not commit adultery were simply laws of the Palestine of two thousand years ago and not relevant today, or telling Jews not to keep Sabbath because this is simply an outmoded practice of three thousand years ago.

Modern secularists might advance these arguments, but it is difficult to understand how Jews or Christians who still follow their religious tradition could do so. As far as Christianity is concerned, how Christians hold the spiritual teachings of Christ to be immutable can be a key for the understanding of how Muslims regard the Shari‘ah .

As for Jews, such an understanding should be even easier, because the Islamic understanding of Divine Law is so similar to that found in Judaism, and the Shari‘ah and Halakhah hold very similar positions in the two religions, respectively. As in Judaism, for Islam Divine Law is more central than theological thought to the religious life.

One can be a very serious Muslim without interest in kalam, or Islamic theology, but one cannot be a serious Christian without interest in Christian theology unless one is a mystic or pietist. One could, in fact, say that what theology is to Christianity, the Shari‘ah , or Divine Law, is to Islam.

To be a Muslim is to accept the validity of the Shari‘ah , even if one is too weak to practice all of its injunctions, and to understand the Shari‘ah is to gain knowledge of the formal religious structure of Islam.