What is the Sharia? Baudoin Dupret
For today's book of the week, the Book Office and Baudoin Dupret ask the question What is the Sharia? The book is published by Hurst Publishing, in a translation by David Bond and in association with the Aga Khan University Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations.
... And to give you a hint of what it's all about, the author himself unfolds a few threads for us.
WHAT IS THE SHARIA?
Sharia is literally the mundane path that leads to God. This path, as for many religions, encompasses a normative dimension, that is, a set of prescriptions and prohibitions. Sharia is thus a Law with a capital L, since it is of a divine essence. This being said, one still has to explore the sources from which the Law derives, their hierarchy, their interpretations, how scholars and believers obtained it and the many forms it can take in various contexts.
Among the many possible understandings of the term Sharia, there are two which, although antithetical, respond to each other as in a game of deforming mirrors. One makes of the Sharia a virtuous abstraction, a model of behavior, and an intangible norm for the believer. The other considers the Sharia as the incarnation of backward Islam, the holder of values intrinsically opposed to modern civilization. Both perspectives have in common to reify Sharia, to make of Sharia something in itself, an essence, with this paradoxical consequence that it is not so much the sources on which these antagonistic conceptions are drawing which differ than the value that is attributed to them. In other words, these two conceptions are the two faces of the same coin, solidary and inseparable, although they are posited as the antipodes of one another.
A dispatch on French television dated December 6, 2016 serves as an example. Here is an excerpt: “The terrorist group Islamic State, ousted from its Libyan stronghold of Sirt, last Monday, by the forces of the National Union government, had established a daily organisation regulated by the Sharia… During more than one and a half years, in this coastal city, ultra-radical Islamists had created the embryo of an Islamic state. With the help of tribunals, prisons, a police of good morals, a recruiting center, and a system of tax levy, all ruled by the Sharia, Qur’anic law was applied to the letter.”
After reading this dispatch, it could seem that the Sharia is endowed, for the journalist and for its partisans, with a clear sense and precise content. Is this the case? What is the situation more precisely?
The term Sharia (shari‛a) possesses for the believer an intrinsic meaning which it is not the book’s intention to reject or adopt. The sole tenable position consists of observing what is said about the Sharia and to give an account of this, indicating in which circumstances and how the Sharia is used. In this respect we must recognise the multiple understandings of the term, through time and space, but also from one person to another, and even more, from one context to another. Sharia becomes a concept which is accessible to the understanding only if one studies its practical manifestations, while placing aside the question of whether such a manifestation corresponds to the “true” or “false,” “orthodox” or “heterodox” meaning of the word.
Such is the main aim of this book.
Baudoin Dupret
The booklaunch of What is the Sharia? will take place on May 10 in the Aga Khan University - Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations.
Baudouin Dupret is educated in Law, Islamic Sciences and Political Sciences. He spent many years as a CNRS researcher in Egypt, Syria, and Morocco. He has published extensively on sociology and anthropology of law, and on legislation in the Middle East and North Africa, including the co-authored Law at Work.
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