Muslim Custom and Case-Law

Abstract

Ideally the life of a Muslim is governed in every aspect by the command of Allah, the only law-giver of the Muslim community. The code of rights and obligations which represents the attempt to define the will of Allah with regard to each and every sphere of human activity is known as the Shari'a, and, in the traditional view, this system achieved, in all essentials, a full and final expression by the end of the Ioth century A.D. It is, accordingly, from the works of these early mediaeval times, or subsequent works continuing the same tradition and recognised as authoritative, that Shari'a doctrine is to be ascertained. Positive Shari'a law is formally and systematically represented as derived from four principal sources. The first two of these represent the material sources of divine revelation-the Qur'an, to the Muslim the ipsissima verba of Allah, and the divinelyinspired practice of the prophet (sunna) transmitted in the form of ahddzth or reports. The third is the ijma', the consensus of opinion of the qualified scholars of any one generation; and the final source is the method of analogical deduction (qiyds) by which the principles established by the Qur'an, sunna and ijmd' are extended to cover new cases. While custom as such was not