# Sharia The divinely ordained moral and legal framework of [[Islam]] — and, in American political discourse since roughly 2009, one of the most effective dogwhistles in the [[Islamophobia]] repertoire. Both facts are true at once, and the vault needs the first to make sense of the second. ## The distinction the discourse erases **Sharia** is the divine ideal: God's guidance, understood as complete and unchanging. **Fiqh** is human jurisprudence — the fallible scholarly effort to work out what sharia requires. Classical Muslim jurists were emphatic about the difference. Fiqh is contested, plural, and revisable; four Sunni legal schools and several Shia ones reached different conclusions from the same texts and considered each other orthodox. The overwhelming majority of what sharia governs is **ritual and personal**: prayer, fasting, almsgiving, pilgrimage, dietary rules, marriage, divorce, inheritance, contracts, charitable endowment. The *hudud* — the fixed corporal penalties that dominate Western reference to the term — are a tiny fraction of the corpus, hedged in classical fiqh with evidentiary requirements so demanding that jurists explicitly designed them to be nearly unenforceable, and applied today in a handful of states. For an American Muslim, "following sharia" overwhelmingly means praying five times, not eating pork, giving zakat, and having a religious marriage contract alongside a civil one — the same order of practice as an Orthodox Jew keeping kosher and a *ketubah*. That comparison is the one the anti-sharia campaign cannot afford to have made, which is why it is not made. ## The legal schools Four surviving Sunni *madhhabs*, each named for a jurist: **Hanafi** (Abu Hanifa, 699–767; Turkey, Central and South Asia), **Maliki** (Malik ibn Anas, 711–795; North and West Africa), **Shafi'i** (al-Shafi'i, 767–820, who systematized legal theory itself; Southeast Asia, East Africa), and **Hanbali** (Ahmad ibn Hanbal, 780–855; the Arabian Peninsula, and the ancestor of [[Wahhabism]]). [[Shia Islam]] has its own, principally the Ja'fari. **The "gate of ijtihad closed" claim is false and the refutation is standard.** Wael Hallaq's 1984 article in the *International Journal of Middle East Studies* showed that the story of Muslim jurists shutting down independent legal reasoning around 900 CE is unfounded: legal theory treated *ijtihad* as a permanent duty, qualified *mujtahids* existed continuously, the phrase does not appear in legal literature until the late 11th century, and no consensus on closure was ever reached. The claim survives in Western commentary mainly because it supports a story about Islamic civilizational stagnation. See [[Orientalism]]. ## Contemporary application Application varies enormously and the variation is the point: - **Full incorporation** — [[Saudi Arabia]], [[Iran]], Afghanistan under the [[Taliban]], and [[Syria]]'s post-Assad Constitutional Declaration of 13 March 2025, which makes Islamic jurisprudence "a main source" of legislation. - **Personal-status law only** — most Muslim-majority states: sharia governs marriage, divorce and inheritance while criminal and commercial law is civil. - **No formal role** — Turkey since Atatürk, and the secular republics of Central Asia. ## Right-wing politics tributaries **The [[Anti-Sharia Movement]].** Since 2010, **201 anti-sharia bills have been introduced across 43 states**, most descended from **David Yerushalmi**'s "American Laws for American Courts" model bill, promoted through **ACT for America** and **Frank Gaffney**'s [[Center for Security Policy]]. Oklahoma's SQ 755 passed with 70 percent of the vote in 2010 and was permanently struck down as an Establishment Clause violation in 2013. Yerushalmi has been unusually candid that the legislation was never meant to do legal work: *"If this thing passed in every state without any friction, it would have not served its purpose. The purpose was heuristic."* The bills exist to teach the electorate that Muslims are a threat. Read that sentence next to the [[Project Blitz]] model-legislation strategy in [[Christian Nationalism]] and the family resemblance is exact — model bills as pedagogy rather than policy. **The Establishment Clause irony.** Anti-sharia laws are unconstitutional for precisely the reason [[Christian Nationalism]] wants the Establishment Clause narrowed: they single out one religion for disfavor. A movement seeking public religious establishment for Christianity and statutory disfavor for Islam has to win two arguments that point in opposite directions, and the "history and tradition" reasoning of *[[Kennedy v. Bremerton]]* is the tool being used to square them. **The projection.** Nothing in the [[Anti-Sharia Movement]] describes anything American Muslims have proposed. The program of governing civil society by revealed religious law, in the United States, is the actual stated goal of [[Christian Reconstructionism]] and [[Theonomy]] — a movement with a literature, seminaries, and elected officials. The threat is real; the religion is different. ## See also [[Islam]] | [[Sunni Islam]] | [[Shia Islam]] | [[Caliphate]] | [[Jihad]] | [[Anti-Sharia Movement]] | [[Islamophobia]] | [[Theocracy]] | [[Theonomy]] | [[Christian Reconstructionism]] | [[Islam Timeline]]