بِسْمِ اللَّهِ الرَّحْمَنِ الرَّحِيم
Sharia (Arabic: شَرِيعَة), is religious law that forms part of the Islamic faith. It is from the religious precepts of Islam, particularly the Al-Quran and the hadith. In Arabic, the term sharīʿah refers to God’s immutable divine law and contrasts with fiqh, its human scholarly interpretations.
The traditional theory of Islamic jurisprudence recognises four sources of Sharia: the Al-Quran, sunnah (authentic hadith), qiyas (analogical reasoning), and ijma (juridical consensus). Different Islamic schools of thought—the most prominent are Hanafi, Maliki, Shafiʽi school, and Hanbali—developed methodologies for deriving Sharia rulings from scriptural sources using a process known as ijtihad. Traditional jurisprudence (fiqh) distinguishes two principal branches of law, ʿibādāt (rituals) and muʿāmalāt (social relations), which together comprise a wide range of topics. Its rulings are concerned with ethical standards and legal norms, assigning actions to one of five categories: mandatory, recommended, neutral, abhorred, and prohibited. Thus, some areas of Sharia overlap with the Western notion of law, while others correspond more broadly to living life following God’s will.