Islamic law

A Muslim’s life ideally is ruled by Islamic religious law, the sharia. The sharia is a narrow sense is God’s eternal will as expressed in the Quran and in the example given by the Prophet Muhammad, the sunna. The Islamic jurisprudence or fiqh is based on the sharia. Sharia in a broad sense includes not only Quran and sunna, but also legislation resulting from the fiqh. The fiqh draws on various sources. These are discussed in this chapter, along with the different ways in which rules and norms can be derived from those sources. Separate attention is paid to the question of how Muslims living among a non-Muslim majority should observe the sharia.