Islamic Law in Theory & History Islamic Law in Theory a

In the eyes of the general public in the Western world, "Islamic law" is virtually synonymous with certain "canonical" punishments, punishments which (in liberal Western eyes) are harsh, backwards, even barbaric: floggings, severing of hands, beheadings, the stoning to death of adultresses. Ironically, it is precisely the reaction of Western sensibilities to these punishments which, perhaps, most recommends them to cynical politicians in the Muslim world.

Serious efforts by Muslim reformers and intellectuals to construct a modern system of Islamic criminal jurisprudence and penology, by contrast, receive essentially no attention in the Western mass media. This is neither surprising nor necessarily due to any antiMuslim prejudice. Legal theory and penology are, to the general public, stupifyingly dull subjects. Coverage even of American penology in the American popular press is confined largely to polemical debates about the death penalty, and cries for "getting tough" on the one side and prisoncondition "exposes" on the other side.

In fact, however, strictly criminal jurisprudence has received rather little attention from Islamic legal thinkers. There are two reasons for this. One is that the existing body of Shari'a ("Islamic law"), and Islamic jurisprudential tradition, is overwhelmingly directed towards what an American would call "civil law," for reasons to be discussed bel

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their interests ever more to questions of private life or perhaps of factional dogma. (Hodgson, 1974: 336) This tendency of the shari'a legal scholars to isolate themselves from political concerns was accentuated by the view, which became general among Muslims, that the caliphs had fallen off sharply from the early standards of piety as they became potentates sitting in splendor amid Byzantine or Persianstyle courts. The dissociation of Shari'a jurisprudence from government became even stronger as the centrality of the Caliphate itself broke down, and effective power fell into the hands of local governors and emirs. The result was the emergence in the Muslim world, by the age of the Abbasid Caliphate, of a system of dual courts (Hodgson, 1974: 345ff). The shari'a courts were the courts of the marketplace, and of the middle and "lowermiddle" (respectably poor) classes in the cities. They were the courts that handled business cases, familylaw cases, and which oversaw the general maintenance of public morals. Alongside these courts, working by fatwa precedent, and managed by qadis trained in shari'a jurisprudence, were governmental courts that were more admi
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 9992
Approximate Pages = 40 (250 words per page)