An Introduction to Islamic Law (41 page)

 

 

For over a millennium, and until the nineteenth century, the Shari
a represented a complex set of social, economic, moral, educational, intellectual and cultural practices. It was not just about law. It pervaded social structures so deeply that no ruler could conceive of the possibility of efficiently ruling the population without succumbing to a great extent to the dictates of the Shari
a order. Involving institutions, groups and processes that resisted, enhanced and affected each other, Shari
a as practice manifested itself as much in the judicial process as in writing, studying, teaching and documenting. It manifested itself in political representation, and in strategies of resistance against political and other abuses, as well as in cultural categories that meshed into ethical codes and a moral view of the world. It lived and operated in a deeply moral community which it took as granted, for it is a truism that the Shari
a itself was constructed on the assumption that its audiences and consumers were, all along, moral communities and morally grounded individuals.

The Shari
a also involved a complex and sophisticated
intellectual system in which the jurists and the members of the legal profession were educators and thinkers who, on the one hand, were historians, mystics, theologians, logicians, men of letters and poets, and, on the other, contributed to the forging of a multi-layered set of relations that at times created political truth and ideology while at other times confronting power with its own truth. It involved the regulation of agricultural and mercantile economies that constituted the vehicle for the maintenance of material and cultural lives that spanned the entire gamut of “classes” and social strata. It rested on a theological bedrock that colored and directed much of the worldview of the population whose inner spiritual lives and relationships were in daily touch with the law. Indeed, this theological base encompassed the mundanely mystical, the esoterically pantheistic and the rationally philosophical, thereby creating complex relations between the Shari
a and the larger spiritual and intellectual orders in which, and alongside which, it lived and functioned. The Shari
a then was not only a judicial system and a legal doctrine whose function was to regulate social
relations and resolve and mediate disputes, but also a pervasive and systemic practice that structurally and organically tied itself to the world around it in ways that were vertical and horizontal, structural and linear, economic and social, moral and ethical, intellectual and spiritual, epistemic and cultural, and textual and poetic, among much else. The Shari
a was as much a way of living and of seeing the world as it was a body of belief and intellectual play
.

While in its textual and technical exposition the Shari
a was, by necessity, of an
elitist tenor, very little else in it was elitist. As we saw in the early chapters of this book, the Shari
a cultivated itself within, and derived its ethical and moral foundations from, the very
social order which it came to serve in the first place. Its personnel hailed from across all social strata (especially the middle and the lower classes), and operated and functioned within communal and popular spaces. The
qadi
’s court, the professor’s classroom and the
mufti
’s assembly were typically held in the mosque’s yard, and when this was not the case, in the marketplace or a private residence. That these sites served, as they did, a multiplicity of other social and religious-communal functions strongly suggests that the intersection of the legal with the communal was a marker of the law’s populism and communitarianism. The same can be said of legal knowledge, which, as we saw, could scarcely have been more widespread across the entire range of society, free of charge. The Shari
a defined, in good part (and together with Sufism), cultural knowledge. Enmeshed with local customs, ethics, and economic and cultural practices, it was an encompassing system of social values
.