Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

170 t CHAPTER SEVEN
circles in late Umayyad times, not, however, in support of current
local practices, but often in opposition to them.
In principle, the qadi’s justice was the only justice for Muslims—
and only for Muslims: the dhimmis, the Jews and Christians of the
Abode of Islam, rendered justice in their own communities according
to their own laws—and no person or class was exempt from it.
No one is above the law in Islam. The qadi’s judicial power was
absolute within his own geographical jurisdiction, but as the rulers
of the umma and its various successor states began to centralize
the administration of justice, hierarchical arrangements eventually
appeared, from local judges to the grand qadis of major jurisdictions.
The qadi’s powers did not end with rendering judgment on cases
brought before him. He possessed as well a kind of extraordinary
jurisdiction that extended into such religious matters as superintending
public prayer and mosques, the charge of orphans, widows,
and the divorced, and even such secular matters as finances
and administration. But the qadi’s once broad jurisdiction has
shrunk over the centuries. Even under nominally Islamic regimes
there grew a body of secular or civil law, often disguised as one
form or other of executive decree, that progressively narrowed the
qadi’s field to personal law, matters touching on divorce settlements
and inheritances, for example. The process was hastened in
the early twentieth century when many Middle Eastern regimes
adopted a constitutional base with a full body of explicitly secular
law and a secular judiciary, and it is in the newer, professedly Islamic
states like the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Islamic Republic
of Iran that the sharia has been restored to some semblance
of the law of the land and the qadi reestablished as a primary
judicial authority.
Islamic Morality and Islamic Jurisprudence
As a manual of behavior the Quran is obviously incomplete, at
least in the sense that its general principles of morality have not
been drawn out into every one, or indeed many, of the forms that
human behavior might take. A great deal more detailed instruction