Essay On Islam Legal Practices

Islam dormant or alive? Some authors believe that Islamic Legal Tradition has become dormant. They believe this extinction was started with the emergence of the state and modernity. Before the emergence of the State, in Islamic countries there were no codified rules or procedures. The cases were being decided by the Qadi who was almost relying on Mufti’s fatwa and rulings. At that time for finding a legal rule which was not covered by other sources of Quran, Mujhatids had the option to do independent ijtehad, meaning that they were using all other sources of Quran and were extracting a new ruling based on those sources by doing ijtehad. Scholars particularly Islamic scholars had a lot of authority to produce new rulings and to decide upon a case. Most of the scholars as Hallaq and Feldman believe that Islamic …show more content…
In the 19 century, the Ottoman Empire, whose leader was claiming him for leading the Islamic world as caliph adopted some set of rules as legislative codes. This was against Islamic tradition and the way it was being practiced, Islamic tradition was always unwritten and codifying it was somehow against fiqh or sharia because they were never meant to be codified. Sharia is not codified because it allows different opinions of scholars to be heard and it allows system of flexibility in itself and by codifying laws they were limiting those flexibilities. India was colonized by British and the British decided to have codified rules for India since sharia law was too flexible and this made difficult to determine the outcome of a case. They translated Hidaya for the people of India. Now judges or Qadi had to use Hidaya as a source of law and they were no more relying on opinions of scholars. This in deed took authority form community of Ulama and vests it on State. While states were developing codes and legislative rules for the States, they were using part of rulings form the legal tradition of Islam but it was not a