Sharia Law An Introduction - by Mohammad Hashim Kamali

FOREWORD
The term SharÊ‘ah, often translated as ‘Islamic law’, is among the
most hotly debated and contested of Islamic ideas – both among
Muslims and more recently as part of a political discourse in the West.
Yet all too often, we seem to be talking past one another. The great
masters of Sharʑah often seem ill-prepared to convey the nuances
and origin of this foundational Islamic discourse to a wide audience.
At the same time, there is also a xenophobic perspective in the West
that seeks to collapse the Sharʑah into a trans-historical, reified
notion that stands for all eternity in opposition to gender equality,
democracy, and all that (allegedly) stands at the centre of Western
consciousness. Rare have been the scholars who can speak with
insight and authority about the Sharʑah to a wide audience. That is,
until Mohammad Hashim Kamali.
Dr. Kamali is virtually peerless in his lucid and thorough presentation
of Sharʑah. He manages to stay clear of the usual problematic
presentations, and indeed transcends them. He begins by problematising
the usual presentation of Islam as a religious tradition that is
legalistic and ritualistic, as well as a timeless and eternal presentation
of Sharʑah. Instead, he looks at the origin, historical development,
and contemporary debates about the nature of Islamic law in an imaginative,
meticulously documented, yet accessible format. After reading
this volume, the reader will be informed not only about the
important sources of the SharÊ‘ah such as the Qur’Én and the example
of the Prophet, but also about the methodology whereby Islamic
rulings are extracted from those sources.
In today’s world, intimate knowledge about Islam and Muslims is
not a luxury, but a matter of mutual survival. We, Muslim and non-
Muslim, are in desperate need to come to know one another intimately.
The SharÊ‘ah is not the whole of Islam – there is also
mysticism and philosophy and Qur’Én and piety and poetry and much
more – but it is one of the foundational discourses of Islam. The series
that this book inaugurates is committed to introducing the widest