Status Updates From Sharia Compliant: A User's ...

It was difficult for women to break into the ranks of the ulama. Even when women were literate and got permission from their families to study, they had a tough time finding male teachers who were willing to teach them. There are, indeed, examples of women’s colleges and female scholars, but any reading of precolonial legal texts will demonstrate that legal scholarship was almost exclusively the domain of men.

Precolonial legal theory manuals often cite the following four criteria as necessary and sufficient for becoming a mujtahid: 1. Literacy in Arabic, 2. Awareness of laws contained in the Qurʾan and sunna, 3. Awareness of points of consensus, and 4. Awareness of the principles of Islamic law (usul al-fiqh).

If you were to ask the average fiqh-minded Muslim today whether Islam allows slavery, you would get an unequivocal no. They will say that the Prophet wanted to outlaw slavery, that this was always the intention of the law [..] This complete attitudinal shift suggests that the hack was a good one, that it effectively spoke from within the tradition, and that it will have a lasting impact.

[...] arguments about morality do not in and of themselves change modern state laws. For example, abortion activists believe that it is immoral to deny women access to a full range of family-planning services. When making a legal argument, however, they do not have to prove that denying such services is immoral but that it is illegal, regardless of its morality. The same is true for Islamic law [...]

The particularly colonial innovation was to decree that only one law would be applied in all courts across the land in the interest of justice and fairness. By equating that single codified law with sharia, colonists wittingly or unwittingly encouraged the idea that the sharia is a fixed legal entity that is just and fair precisely because it does not change. Not everyone was on board [..] and many Muslims objected.

Colonists could have borrowed from the then popular Muslim practice of collecting a range of acceptable legal opinions from various legal texts and presenting them as options that judges could choose from when adjudicating civil cases. That would have been laborious and time-consuming but would have better captured how Islamic law functioned in Muslim society. They decided not to do that.

To complicate matters further, these legal texts were not legally binding and were not enforced by authorities. Judges, for instance, were not bound to rule based on any of these texts, and although judges might have personally preferred one legal text over another, they were ultimately free to rule based on their own discretion.

Colonial powers figured that it would be simple enough to develop a criminal code based in colonial law, which they did through a mash-up of the Law of England, the Napoleonic Code, and, oddly enough, the Louisiana Civil Code of 1825. They then set about developing a separate civil code that would be wholly based on local religious laws. The problem was that there was no such thing as a set of “local religious laws”

Colonial powers figured that it would be simple enough to develop a criminal code based in colonial law, which they did through a mash-up of the Law of England, the Napoleonic Code, and, oddly enough, the Louisiana Civil Code of 1825. They then set about developing a separate civil code that would be wholly based on local religious laws.

After the Prophet died in 632, the Muslim community in Arabia expanded quickly, and within a few hundred years Muslims were ruling large swaths of North Africa, southeast Europe, the Middle East, and South Asia. That changed with European colonialism due to a leap in European military technology and a papal bull. In the 1450s, Pope Nicholas V decreed that God had granted Christians command over all the earth.