Sharia
Not a fixed law code but the divine ideal path for Muslim life, endlessly interpreted by scholars and argued over ever since.
The Arabic word sharia originally meant the path to a watering hole, the route that leads to the water a community needs to live. In Islam it came to mean the path God sets out for human life: the ideal, God-given way a Muslim should believe and behave. That is the first thing usually lost in translation. Sharia is routinely rendered 'Islamic law,' but it is closer to a divine ideal than to a written legal code, and Muslims themselves have spent 1,400 years arguing about what it actually requires.
Sharia and fiqh
The crucial distinction is between sharia and fiqh. Sharia is the perfect divine intention, known fully only to God. Fiqh, literally 'understanding,' is the fallible human effort to work it out. Everything in the law books, the rulings scholars issue, is fiqh, not sharia itself, and Muslim jurists have always known the difference between God's law and their own best guess at it.
The scholars derive fiqh from four main sources. First the Quran, and second the Sunna, the recorded example of the Prophet Muhammad as preserved in the hadith. Where these are silent, jurists reason by qiyas, analogy from a known case to a new one, and look to ijma, the consensus of qualified scholars. Because reasoning differs, several schools of law, or madhhabs, took shape by the 10th century: four major ones among Sunnis (Hanafi, Maliki, Shafii, and Hanbali) and the Jafari school among Twelver Shias, a division that traces back to the succession dispute after Muhammad's death. They disagree on countless specifics, and all are considered valid. Islam has no single church or pope to declare one correct.
More than punishment
In the Western imagination sharia often shrinks to a short list of severe penalties, the hudud, amputation for theft or stoning for adultery. These exist in the classical texts, but they are hedged with such strict standards of proof that many jurists held they should almost never be applied. Far more of sharia governs ordinary devotion and daily life: how to pray, fast, and give charity; what may be eaten; how marriage, inheritance, divorce, contracts, and interest-free finance should work; and the ethics of honesty and mercy. For most of Islamic history sharia was not enforced by states at all. It was a scholars' tradition, taught in colleges and applied by learned judges, a body of moral guidance rather than a government code.
A contested inheritance
That older world ended with the modern state, which wanted uniform written statutes. Today 'applying sharia' means wildly different things. Saudi Arabia long treated classical fiqh as enforceable law; Iran built a clerical state around one reading of it; Indonesia, the largest Muslim country, keeps a mostly secular legal system in which sharia governs personal and family matters and, in the province of Aceh, more. Reformers argue that a tradition once famous for flexibility can develop again; hardliners insist the divine path is fixed. Both sides are claiming the same word. The debate over sharia is not really about whether it is law. It is about who gets to walk the path to the water, and how.