God, not as a divine being. The various schools of legal interpretation that have grown up have differing views on the degree to which Qur'anic rules can be set aside. According to some Hanafi scholars, as we noted earlier, the whole of the Shari'a can indeed be set aside, if shura, "consultation and deliberation" (Sfier, 1988: 443). leads to a consensus that the public good requires such an alteration. Shari'a thus contains, at least in some traditional views, provisions for its own amendment.
Shari'a is in principle universal, suited (perhaps with amendments for the public interest) to all the needs of legal regulation in society. In spite of this universal scope in theory, the evolution of Islamic law in practice has been limited by political developments in the early centuries of Islam. The Caliphate lost its moral prestige, and then its effective power. Actual political power devolved on local military commanders, men having almost no moral legitimacy. Such rulers found Shari'a criminal law to be entirely too liberal to serve their security needs.
From a pre Modern point of view, the Shar'i criminal
law was so mild that mot pre Modern Muslim rulers
felt bound to save their subjects from the results
(Hodgson, 1974: 339)
Local rulers thus largely usurped the criminal functions of the law, replacing it with a police power that seldom was rooted in anything more than expediency and arbitrary ruthlessness. This usurpation had relatively little effect upon Shari'a "civil" law on business and family law, for example, and related areas. In these areas, Shari'a remained dominant. The heart of the Muslim community was middle class and urban. This group relied on an "independent judiciary" of cadis, or Islamic law judges, to manage the life of the community. Shari'a non criminal law thus continued to evolve while the development of criminal law w...