The Arabic word sharî'ah is usually translated “Islamic law”. Among many Christians,
the very mention of the application of Islamic law tends to conjure up images of the
amputation of hands, the subjugation of women, or a despotic regime of cruel
intolerance. To what extent is this impression justified either by the theory or the
practice of Islamic law? What kinds of issues are Christians called to face when
confronted with the question of Islamic law and its application in the world today?

The Background of Christian History

The history of the church and of Christian thought makes this a difficult topic for
Christians to approach. We have a complicated and ambiguous relationship with law.
Today, especially in the West, the separation of church and state is held to be axiomatic.
Some even find an echo of this in the words of Jesus, “Give therefore to the emperor the
things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” (Matt. 22:21) (I
acknowledge, however, that readers will be aware of the difficulties involved in the
interpretation of this text, especially in the Jewish and Roman contexts of the first
century C.E.)

That church and state could or should be separate, in the way they now are in
modern secular states, was not always held to be obvious. For centuries, Christians
assumed that there must be an intimate connection between civil law, and divine law.
The relationship has been variously expressed. Although it is a reduction almost to the
point of caricature, we may say that Christian thinkers in the West developed an
elaborate theory of the “two-swords” in which the civil authority was subject to the
ultimate authority of the church. In the Christian East, on the other hand, they
developed a concept that the emperor was the ultimate ruler of both the state and the
church. In either case, it was clear to Christian thinkers that there could be no radical
division between human and divine law, between the church and the state, on
questions of human behavior. Right and wrong were ultimately defined by God.

This assumption changed in the West with the coming of the European
Enlightenment. Gradually, human reason supplanted revealed law as the final arbiter of
truth, and religion became primarily a matter of personal conviction. Of course this is an
oversimplification: in contemporary Europe and American, the relationship between
religion and politics is complex. No one can deny that religion plays an important
political role. But it does so on a par with a great many voluntary organizations. In
various ways the church functions politically in the same manner as the National Rifle
Association, as a group of people who share a common belief that, in their view, should
influence public policy. This is a comparatively modern phenomenon.

The complex history of the relationship between the church and the state in
Christian faith and practice is grounded in the very basis of Christian faith, the
Scriptures. In the Old Testament, God provides the people with a full set of laws
covering much of what today we would consider civil or secular law. Slavery, criminal
procedure, and economic transactions are all included.

In the New Testament, there are passages that seem to uphold the validity of this
body of law, for instance, when Jesus says that consider civil or secular law. Slavery,
criminal procedure, and economic transactions are all included.
In the New Testament, there are passages that seem to uphold the validity of this
body of law, for instance, when Jesus says that not the slightest commandment will pass
away. There are also passages that imply that the law is no longer binding on Christians.
Paul argues that the law was like a tutor or guardian for a child and is no longer
necessary when we have reached maturity in Jesus Christ. There is reference to the “law
of Christ” in Paul’s writings (Gal. 6:2). Some interpret this in terms of Jesus’ new
commandment that we love one another. Others see it in terms of another statement of
Jesus, “[W]hatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven” (Matt. 16:19), which may
be interpreted to refer to the church’s authority to legislate and to create binding and
ultimately enforceable law.

Christian history witnesses to the importance of these matters in the many
theological debates that have raged within the church about law and gospel, or law and
grace, or law and promise. I spend time on the relationship between Christianity and
law because the Islamic understanding of law challenges many of our western secular
assumptions. It is important, therefore, for us to have some perspective on what is
Christian and what is our modern post-Enlightenment secular interpretation of
Christianity. Modern technological society, spawned by post-Enlightenment western
secularism, has reached a point where questions arise about our destroying ourselves
and our planet. This ought to make us willing to subject our unexamined assumptions
to the light of the gospel and to the critique of other women and men of faith.

The Sharî'ah and Contemporary Western Law

Arbitrary Law

Although the word sharî'ah is usually translated “Islamic law,” this is a misnomer. In
several important ways the Islamic concept of the sharî'ah is different from
contemporary western concepts of law, probably most significantly on the question of the
arbitrariness of contemporary western law.

While in western jurisprudence there are concepts of natural justice or of
equity—both of which are often used as judicial and legislative principles— they are
nebulous. Their lack of content may be demonstrated, for example, in the area of the
death penalty. Various western nations, and indeed various states within the United
States, differ on the legitimacy of the death penalty. It is difficult to see how a welldefined
concept of natural justice or of equity would not speak clearly to such a
fundamental question as to whether or not it is just or fair to take a person’s life as a
punishment for crime.

This is, of course, an extreme example. The arbitrariness of western law, however, is
a fact of life. We all know about tax shelters and about how it may be more beneficial
for a business to incorporate in one state rather than another. We know that our
neighbors across the state line pay different taxes, can marry or begin driving a vehicle
at a different age, and even operate under slightly different traffic laws. The ultimate
authority and sovereign power to enact such legislation is, we believe, the will of the
people.

God's Guidance

Islamic law begins with a rather different premise. Echoing the sentiments of the Old
Testament prophets, Islamic faith proclaims God’s intimate concern for justice between
human beings. The solemn practice of religious rites is not acceptable to God without
justice in the courts and in the marketplace. Muslims cannot understand how any
person who really believes that God cares passionately about human justice, and about
the poor and oppressed, can honestly believe that these matters are the concern of the
state—the realm of politics—and that they should be kept separate from religion. It is
not enough to say that religious believers will vote and try to enact laws that are
according to the will of God. The question goes beyond that. Who, the Muslim asks, are
we willing to trust to know what true justice is: some possibly self-seeking politician?
Different interest groups within the community, each seeking to promote its own
position, often at the expense of others? God?

It seems unthinkable to contemporary secular westerners today that religion could
provide a just basis on which to build a fair and equitable society for all. It is precisely
this fear that lies behind the reaction of many to the implementation of Islamic law.

In this context, it is important to have a basis understanding of the sharî'ah. To
begin, the word does not mean “law” at all. The word sharî'ah actually means “a path”
and, more specifically, a path that leads to water—in other words, a path that leads to
life. This connotation is kept alive by the fact that the everyday Arabic word for “street”
is the closely related word sharî'. The sharî'ah is God’s guidance on how to live life
successfully. Basically, God says,

Look, I made this world and it is a marvelous world, wondrously made. But you will never comprehend it in all its physical and spiritual fullness, in that which is seen and unseen. I will teach you how to live in this world. If you follow my instructions you will  have life in all its fullness and enjoy the beauty and the bounty of  my creation. If you do not…well, this marvelous and delicately balanced creation doesn’t provide a wide margin for error.

In Deuteronomy, God tells the Israelites that, if they keep the commandments, the
land will receive rain in its season and be fertile. The modern western worldview turns
such language into poetic imagery; few believe that the way we behave toward God
and our fellow humans can influence natural phenomena. Many—perhaps the
majority—of the Muslims living in the world today believe precisely that. They believe
there is a unity between the seen and the unseen in God’s creation, between the
physical and the spiritual.

This is the basis of Islamic law. It is guidance and direction in living successfully in a
complex and fragile world. This is fundamentally different from a view of law that
accepts the will of the majority as the ultimate source of sovereignty and therefore
introduces an element of arbitrariness that is alien to most concepts of religious law,
including Jewish and pre-Enlightenment Christian understandings.

Plural Legal Systems

From this guidance, the sharî'ah, the Muslim community derives what may be properly
called Islamic law, i.e., fiqh. There are several schools of law (madhåhib) within
Islamic fiqh. Another major difference between western and Islamic law is that Islamic
law allows a plurality of legal systems within one jurisdiction.

Of course, western law also deals with cases of multiple jurisdiction. In the United
States, for example, there is often a question about which court of which system of law
has jurisdiction in a particular case—the federal or the state—and only one system of law
can apply in any particular case. In theory, each jurisdiction is discrete. The jurisdiction
of a particular court in a particular instance is based on either the geographical area of
the crime, the geographical home of the litigants or, in some cases, the nature of the
crime.

This is not the case in Islam. Theoretically, any of the valid schools of Islamic law
can be applied in any geographical area and in any sharî'ah court. Which one is
applied depends on the personal adherence of the person being tried or of the litigants
in a dispute. In some cases the differences between the schools of law can literally mean
the difference between life and death. The Islamic concept of equality before the law
empathetically does not consist of the idea that one law is applied without prejudice to
every citizen. Rather, it is the right of each citizen to be tried according to the conscience
of his or her own religious community.

Although this principle is most highly developed in terms of the different Islamic
schools of law, medieval jurists went a long way in applying it to other religious
communities. In most classical forms of Islamic government, Christians and Jews were
allowed—in fact encouraged—to settle their disputes, both civil and criminal, within
their own communities. Church courts in Muslim lands became powerful instruments of
government and church law became highly developed. There are vestiges of this system
throughout areas that were once a part of the Muslim world.

This is radically different from the traditional western approach to multiple
jurisdictions. In Islamic law, it is not primarily a question of geography—or not
necessarily even the nature of the crime—that determines the jurisdiction. It is a
question of the personal choice of the individual to belong to this or that recognized
community (recognizing that those born into Islam remain within that framework). This
choice carries with it the right to be judged according to the community. Each individual
has the right to choose her or his community, but each individual is recognized as
belonging to a particular community, at least for legal purposes.

Tolerance and Individual Rights

Of course, this does not mean the classical historical formulation of Islamic law was as
liberal in protecting the rights of minorities as many (although by no means all) modern
democratic governments have been. It does mean that the principle existed and,
certainly, it gave to Muslim history an ideal of tolerance that was, in general, absent from
the history and the thought of the Christian West for as long as we can meaningfully
speak of Christian legal systems. A change in the West came only when “Christian”
countries begin to become secularized and the values of secular humanism begin to
control the process and content of legislation.

When, in 1492, the Christian armies defeated the last Muslim stronghold in Spain, the
Jews were expelled from the now-Christian land. Today Judeo-Spanish survives as a
spoken language only in pockets of the eastern Mediterranean. The reason is that the
Jews of Spain fled to the Muslim lands North Africa and the Ottoman Empire.
Historically—not surprisingly—these were also moments of persecution of minorities
under Islamic rule.

Summary

There are at least two fundamental ways in which Islamic law differs from the western
concept of law. First, the law of God is not arbitrary in the way that laws that reflect the
will of the people are. God’s law reflects the Creator’s perfect knowledge that humans,
by definition, cannot have. Second, Islamic law sanctions a plurality of legal systems to
be applied within one jurisdiction on a personal rather than geographical basis. The
application of personal law according to religious belief is incorporated into the legal
system of many countries that were once under Muslim rule. From North Africa through
the Middle East, including Israel, to the south Asian subcontinent and southeast Asia, we
find that national systems of law often allow people to marry, divorce, adopt children,
and inherit according to their religious conscience. Thus polygamy may be legal for
Muslims while it is illegal for Christians. It is a struggle to introduce this kind of pluralism
into western law, although there may be some precedence for it in certain issues of
international law.

The Content of Islamic Law

When we turn to the content of Islamic law, we find that it is broadly divided into two
categories. The first category, 'ibådåt, refers to matters of worship and creed; the
second, mu'åmalåt, refers to matters involving two or more people. That religious law
should teach about matters like marriage and divorce does not seem strange to most
western Christians. These are generally considered fundamentally private aspects of life
and, therefore, compatible with the essentially private and voluntary character of
religious belief in the modern secular world. It is slightly stranger to many in the West
that religious laws should deal with matters of adoption and inheritance. It is
incomprehensible to many that religious law should deal with politics, government,
economics, and criminal law. Nonetheless, Islamic law deals with all thee things. This is
one reason why Muslims sometimes say that Islam is not just a religion but rather a
complete way of life.

From the Muslim perspective, the comprehensive nature of religious law is a direct
consequence of God’s concern for justice in society. The Islamic view of the person is a
balance of the communal and the individual.

The Individual

There is a stark individualism in the Islamic faith. Islamic faith and practice instill a deep
sense of personal accountability before God. Each and every soul is directly responsible
to God. The Qur>ån warns many times not to rely on intercession or mediation. In the
Islamic orthodoxy of the Sunni majority, no one bears the burden of another’s
sinfulness; neither may we look to the merits of another as the basis of our relationship
with God. The teaching of the Qur>ån and orthodox Islamic faith is far removed from
any kind of transactional legalism when it comes to understanding the relationship
between God and the creation. The only basis of our relationship with God is God’s
own graciousness and mercy. In the final analysis, God remains completely free. Many
Christian writers on Islam have mentioned that God in Islam seems to behave ultimately
in a completely arbitrary manner. This, I believe, is a serious misunderstanding—almost
a caricature—of Islamic orthodoxy. Nonetheless, Islamic orthodoxy teaches that even
good works and total obedience to the law of God cannot earn us eternal salvation.
Only the grace of God can do that and the context for this grace is a direct, unmediated
relationship between the creature and the Creator.

The Communal

Islam also has a strong communal dimension. The community is called the ummah, a
word very closely related to the Arabic word umm, meaning “mother”. For Islam,
humanity is fundamentally communal. A human being is created to exist in community.
This is clear even from nature. A child will literally die without a human community to
care for it during the first few years of life. It is also clear from what sociologists and
educators refer to as the socialization process. Children need to be taught; language and
social organization, as well as judgments about moral and beneficial values, need to be
learned. The communal dimension is taken very seriously in Islamic law, in spite of the
strict teaching of a direct and unmediated relationship between the individual soul and
God.

In a sense, one could say that the Islamic vision is of individuals submitted to God
forming a community, a society committed to God. The Islamic sense of identity is of
the just community created out of individuals who have given themselves to God and
who struggle to realize the divine will in their common life together.

Human Interpretation

When put this way, it is difficult to understand why so many Christians and Muslims are
opposed to the imposition of Islamic law. The answer lies partly in history and partly in
the fact that society is composed of human individuals. No system of law exists, no
matter how carefully designed and formulated, that cannot be abused. We have spoken
of the difference between the sharî'ah and Islamic fiqh, and we have said that it is really
the latter that should be called law. Of course, the codifications that we find in Islamic
fiqh are based on the precepts of the sharî'ah and are intended to be an interpretation
of the God-given guidance contained in revelation. Inevitably, however, they reflect the
human beings who are doing the interpretation.

God-fearing people can genuinely differ over the meaning of the divine revelation.

This is, in fact, one of the reasons why Islam has faithfully allowed a plurality of law to
be applied within any one jurisdiction. Realizing that there may be more than one
possible interpretation of God’s law, honest and God-fearing men and women can
genuinely differ over the meaning of the divine revelation. Of course, there are limits,
and several recognized systems of exegesis developed within the Muslim community.

This attitude contrasts markedly with the concept of uniformity of law that
predominates both in western secular law and in the Jewish approach to religious law.
In the Talmud, following a debate between the school of Hillel and the school of
Shammai, we read of a voice from heaven that declared,

These are the words of the living God and those are the words of the living
God, but the law is according to the school of Hillel.

In other words, both were valid interpretations of the divine text, but there could only
be one law applied in the community—so both interpretations could not have full legal
standing. Islamic law has always recognized that there may legitimately be a number of
valid interpretations of the Word of God, and the community does not seek arbitrarily to
set one human opinion over and above another, especially when both opinion over and
above another, especially when both opinions are those of devout and pious women
and men.

Some Specific Issues

Rights of the Accused

Unfortunately, when we hear about Islamic law, it is usually in the sensationalist context
of the media. Many people know, for example, that Islamic law provides punishments
like cutting off a hand for theft and stoning to death for adultery. It is certainly true that
provision for these punishment is in the sharî'ah. Unfortunately, the press never bothers
to explain the way in which these laws, called hudüd (“limits”), are actually applied
according to the codifications of Islamic law.

Already in the early Middle Ages. Islam had developed a major concern for
protecting the rights of the accused and for restricting the application of the hudüd. This
restraint occurred not because the hudüd were felt to be unjust in any way but because
they are God’s prerogative and part of God’s rights over human being. The Islamic
jurists wanted to make sure that the rights of God were not abused by humans. These
are terrible punishments for humans to pervert to their own ends. The jurists therefore
created a system for protecting people accused of the applicable crimes.

In the case of death for adultery, the jurists required that there be four male
witnesses to the actual act of penetration. If these were not found, or it their testimony
was not trustworthy, the death penalty could not be applied unless a guilty party
confessed. Even in that case, many jurists required three separate confessions and urged
the judge to encourage the person not to make the confessions at all.

In the case of theft, there must have been two male witnesses to the crime. Even
when there were, however, the jurists limited the application of the law in other ways.
The stolen goods needed to have a certain value. The cutting of hands was never
applied in cases where hunger was the motive for the theft. The property had to have
been secured and there must be no way the thief could possibly have believed that he
had any claim to it. Thus, in some schools of interpretation of the law, relatives cannot
steal from each other, and in others employees cannot steal from their employers.

Women

This aspect of Islamic law—its concern to protect the rights of the accused—is hardly
ever pointed out in contexts where Islamic law is criticized for being backward and
even barbaric. Such selectivity is typical of the way Islamic law is treated by many
western writers and by the media in particular. They make us aware, for example, of the
poor situation of women in Muslim lands and of their lack of rights. Sadly, this is often,
although not always, true. Only rarely are we told that much of the current situation is
because of poverty or culture and is the common condition of women—and men—in
many parts of the world. We are hardly ever told that Islamic law gave married women
the right to conduct business and own property in their own names 1,400 years ago. In
addition, Islamic law guaranteed that husbands could not interfere with, or lay claim to,
their wives’ property and earnings. Women in the United States did not receive these
rights until the twentieth century.

The Situation Today

Surely this does not change the fact that the condition of women in many Muslim
countries is appalling, not does it change the fact that men and women have had their
hands cut off for stealing, or have been severely beaten for drinking wine, or in some
cases have been put to death for adultery. It is important, however, to put the
contemporary situation in context.

The Colonial Heritage

Education

It is necessary to put aside the sensationalism of the media. We must remember that in
the final analysis we are speaking about people. Islam is embodied in the Muslim
community throughout the world—mean and women who struggle with varying
degrees of faith, commitment, and understanding to be faithful to God in their daily
lives. They have histories: communal and personal, social and psychological,
intellectual and political, economic and material.

The Muslim world lies, for the most part, within the old colonial empires of western
Europe. Many Muslim countries have only regained their independence within the last
fifty years. Their experience of the colonial heritage is, in most cases, as negative as that
of Latin American Catholic Christians, Asian Hindus and Buddhists, or Filipino Catholics.

Colonialism had a profound effect on the development of Islamic law. The colonial
education systems replaced an earlier educational system where religion was an integral
part of the curriculum. Colonial education prepared people for the civil service and for
life in the modern world. No longer did the main educational system of a country
provide the basis for training the religious jurists of Islam. The Islamic educational
system gradually became more and more isolated from the mainstream of public life
and from the development of the country.

Many of the founders and members of modern Islamic movements were not trained
in the traditional religious educational system but in colonial (or neo-colonial)
educational systems. These include sociologists like 'Ali Shariati of Iran, who through
his writings influenced the Iranian Revolution, even after his death, and public school
teachers like Hassan al-Banna of Egypt, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Increasingly, the membership of such Islamic movements is drawn from the physics,
mechanical engineering, and similar faculties in the universities. These movements are
attempting to bring Islamic thought—and especially Islamic law—face to face with the
problems of the modern world. The result is often a split between the religiously trained
scholars, the 'ulamå', and the leaders of many of the modern Islamic movements.

The long separation of religious education and secular education has also caused
Islamic law to become outdated in many respects, and there is urgent need felt
throughout the Islamic world for some kind of reform.

Forced participation

Anger and fear—the other conditions created by the colonial experience—are less easy
to describe objectively. Although it may be hard to describe, the anger felt by people
living in many third-world nations is not difficult to see. It can be observed on television
and in newspapers; it was apparent in the Iranian hostage crisis; and it has been
encountered again in the recent Somali conflict. People are angry not only at their
colonial heritage but at being forced into a world economy without the real possibility
of remaining separate from it, no matter what the cost to their traditional culture and
way of life. No nation today can afford to remain apart from the modern technological
world economy. If a nation were to try, its technologically more advanced neighbors
would see that it did not remain an independent nation for very long.

There is anger. The colonial experience marginalized people’s own religious
institutions and abolished their traditional forms of government. The modern
technological world economy makes it impossible for them to stand aside in order to
redevelop themselves, to find themselves, and to create a new identity for the end of the
twentieth century.

Secular westerners must not be surprised at the anger, pain, fear, and confusion that
so many people in many parts of the world feel toward the West today. It would be
helpful if westerners accepted this fact without feeling the need to become either
defensive or offensive in return. We can and must accept responsibility for some of the
situations without feeling guilty, personally or even collectively. A genuine moral
responsibility, rather than an oppressive and emotional guilt, may help us to understand
what is happening not only in the Muslim world but in many other parts of the
underdeveloped world.

Directions of Contemporary Reshaping

In the context of their faith, Muslims seek to be faithful to God. Of necessity, they work
toward reshaping their faith in our time. They often do so with great integrity in their
relationship to God. But we also ask, What attitude applies to their relationship to their
fellow human beings as they struggle to recodify Islamic law in the late twentieth
century? The answer, I believe, will be shaped in part by ourselves as Christians. If we
unthinkingly dismiss Muslim anger or, worse, blame Islam for what is in fact an
expression of human anguish and longing, then Muslims are likely to dismiss us from
serious positive consideration. If we, without dialog or without an attempt to
understand, label Islamic law as barbaric and uncivilized, Muslims are not likely to sit
down with us and work with us as they shape their response to the modern world.

I hope that Muslims and Christians will go forward together rather than in opposition
to each other. I fear that the unthinking response to Islam and to Islamic law that fills
not only the media but also our churches will virtually guarantee that Muslims around
the world will, in the twenty-first century, define themselves with negative reference
toward Christians.

We Christians have been given the ministry of reconciliation by Jesus. We have been
taught,

 So when you are offering you gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has
 something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your
 brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift. (Matt. 5:23-24)

Let us be reconciled with Muslims throughout the world, and let us be reconcilers.