500L- ISLAMIC CRIMINAL LAW

What today is called “Islamic criminal law” is actually drawn from three categories of rules—hadd, qisas and tazir—within the classical legal literature.3 The first category of rules, hadd (pl. hudud), means “the limits prescribed by God.” Hadd offenses, of which there are between five and seven,4 are characterized by the fact that they carry a fixed punishment.5 Before discussing the specific offenses that are considered hadd, it will be helpful to explain why it is that the number of such offenses cannot be stated with certainty. The explanation for the uncertainty as to the number of hadd offenses lies in the basic character of Islamic law. Islamic law is regarded as God’s will for humankind. God has not, however, seen fit to make the divine law known in detail. He has provided indications of the law in the Qur’an and the recorded example of the life of Muhammad, but left the task of extracting meaning from these sources to human interpreters. In the pre-modern era Islamic law was generally identified with fiqh. The word “fiqh,” which means “understanding, comprehension, or knowledge,” refers to the conclusions, opinions, or understanding of legal scholars with respect to particular points of law. Legal scholars who authored books of fiqh (addressing a more or less standard set of issues) published such books under their own names. In general it was to this fiqh literature that the classical legal tradition looked to find answers to concrete legal issues. Islamic legal theory developed elaborate rules of interpretation to ensure that the conclusions of the legal scholars did not stray from the revealed sources. For various reasons, however, agreement as to the correct interpretation of the sources proved impossible, and diversity of opinion is the norm rather than the exception in the fiqh literature. That diversity of opinion is manifest most clearly in the existence of a number of different schools of thought or doctrine. There are four such schools or “madhhab” within the majority Sunni branch of Islam, each of which is recognized as fully orthodox by the other schools. The Sunni madhhab, named after the supposed founder of the school, differ from each other on both points of doctrine and matters of method.