SHARIAsource

Ethiopian law allows personal and family law matters to be adjudicated in sharīʿa courts as long as all parties voluntarily submit to the courts’ jurisdiction. This Proclamation spells out three levels of sharīʿa courts: (1) the Federal First-Instance Court of Sharia, (2) the Federal High Court of Sharia (which hears appeals and cases above a certain monetary threshold), and (3) the Federal Supreme Court of Sharia. The courts apply Islamic law but follow civil rules of procedure. The Federal Courts of Sharia are the country’s only official courts that apply religious law.

In December 2018, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) considered the question whether Muslim citizens who lived in the Greek province of Thrace could be required to submit to the jurisdiction of Islamic law, as detailed by local experts called muftīs. In Greek law, Islamic law usually governed matters of family law—such as marriage, divorce, and inheritance—in cases involving the Muslims in Thrace. This arrangement was a legacy of the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres and the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne. When the ECHR considered whether this arrangement should persist, it considered a case in which a Muslim man had died, leaving everything to his wife in his will. His sisters contested the will, arguing that it improperly circumvented the authority of the muftīs. Greece’s highest court agreed with the sisters. With the will invalidated, the muftī distributed one-fourth of the estate to the widow, and the rest to the sisters, in accord with Islamic inheritance law. The widow appealed to the ECHR. This Court determined that the Greek government had misinterpreted the treaties, which did not require a separate legal framework for Muslims. It further noted that Greek case law was inconsistent about “whether the application of Sharia law [sic] is compatible with the principle of equal treatment and with international human rights standards.” In addition, the Court emphasized a right to "free self-identification”: people should be free to opt out of differential treatment from the government on the basis of belonging to a minority group, and the government should not force minorities into a special legal category in the name of protecting them. The Court held that Greece, by compelling the Muslim minority of Thrace to follow Islamic law, had violated Article 14 (prohibition of discrimination) of the 1950 European Convention on Human Rights.

This document is a beyānnāme, or declaration, sent by the Ottoman reʾīsül-kuttāb (chief scribe) to Britain's ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, justifying the Ottoman declaration of war on Russia by explaining Russia's violation of treaty obligations. The document gives insight into eighteenth-century Ottoman attitudes to international law and its relationship with Islamic law. Its use of the phrase naḳż-ı ʿahd (breaking the treaty), which has its origins in a specifically Qurʾānic context illustrates one way in which war was legitimized within the Ottoman Empire. Other phrases used in the beyānnāme demonstrate how Ottoman legal plurality functioned within a martial context. 

This entry provides a definition and analysis of the term ḥadīth, drawing on works by SHARIAsource Senior Scholar, Joseph Lowry, Associate Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania.

On July 28, 1958, the colonial government of the Northern Region of Nigeria appointed a panel of jurists to examine the multiple systems of law existing in the region and to make recommendations for avoiding conflict among those plural systems. The multiple systems of law were English common law, British colonial statutory law, customary law, and Islamic law. The product of the panel’s deliberations was the Penal Code of 1960. This Penal Code abrogated the application of the sharīʿa to criminal mattes and abolished the judicial powers of the Islamic rulers. The Penal Code was based on the Sudan Penal Code of 1899, which had been enacted by the British colonial government. The Sudan Penal Code was itself derived from the Indian Penal Code, 1834. This document is the report of the Panel of Jurists.

A petition sent to the Ottoman Sultan from Egypt in 1155 AH (1742-3), concerning a dispute between a Muslim and a Christian in the town of Zifta. The Muslim petitioner attempts to enforce the regulation of the Pact of 'Umar that forbids non-Muslims from having houses taller than those of Muslims. Baldwin's commentary on the petition focuses on how the petitioning process relates to the sharīʿa court system in the Ottoman Empire.

This Country Profile provides a basic overview of the legal history and institutional structures of the Republic of Namibia, based on research produced by GlobaLex at NYU Law School and the Library of Congress. Under Namibia's Constitution, Islamic law (sharīʿa or fiqh) has no legal status. 

In preambular statement (b), this regional regulation states that Parepare Municipal Regulation No. 6 of 1999 on the Retribution of Licensing for Alcohol Points of Sale needs to be revoked and replaced with a regulation that prohibits alcoholic beverages. It states that the prohibition on alcoholic beverages in this regulation is, among other things, a way of implementing religious values and the morals of a religious umat (community) (art 4). Accordingly, this regulation prohibits all legal entities and persons from producing, storing, distributing, channelling, placing, promoting, and selling alcoholic beverages in the region (art 5(1)), while all persons are prohibited from consuming alcohol in the region (art 5(2)). Foreigners visiting Parepare are exempted and may bring and consume alcoholic beverages with an alcohol content of five per cent (art 6).