Bloomsbury Unravelling Sharia: Muslim Constitutionalism and the Reform of Islamic Law

Implementation of the Sharia, as the divine, religious law of Islam, has consistently featured as an integral part of the Muslim constitutionalism. The Muslim world has remained preoccupied with interpreting and enforcement of the Sharia principles, often at the detriment of constitutional principles. In its legal permutations, the Sharia also poses the most substantial challenge to accepting global human rights standards. This study contends that the continuing inability to frame an appropriate role for the Sharia is inhibiting human right with the effect of crippling economic, social and political developments within the Muslim world. In supporting the separation between religious principles as determined by the Sharia vis-a-vis secularist legal principles of human rights and rule of law, the study makes the radical assertion that the Sharia (although divinely ordained) was never designed to have a legislative character for the determination of public laws and public policy. In addition it argues that that any attempts to regulate human and social behaviour within the Quran was contextually-driven and that these social regulations were and transient and not intended to pronounce God’s eternal law. This book offers a radical restatement of our understanding and application of Sharia by one of the subject’s foremost scholars.