Islamic Law and Crime in Contemporary Courts

Abstract

What is today referred to as ‘criminal law’ does not exist in the classical Islamic legal tradition. This is because criminal law as currently understood did not exist anywhere prior to the emergence of the modern nation state. The collection of classical era doctrines that are today discussed under the label ‘Islamic criminal law’ were not understood as comprising a unified area of law in the pre-modern era, and not all of those classical era rules fit the modern definition of crime. The construction of modern Islamic criminal law is a result of assimilating a diverse body of classical doctrines to the categories of modern law.