Geography and gender, sharia law and it's effects on women and men in Essay

Geography and gender, sharia law and it's effects on women and men in countries with sharia - Essay Example Islamic law is derived from the Qura’n, the revelation of God to Prophet Muhammad. Life in an Islamic society is supposed to follow the tenets of Islamic law. Islamic law includes prayer, fasting, pilgrimage as well as laws pertaining to family, crime and commerce. Islam however does not have an official clergy. Therefore Islamic law or sharia, meaning the path, was developed by the ullema, the scholars who have come to assume a position of power and status in Islamic society. It is the ullema who issue fatwas or religious edicts. However within Islam there have been voices of concern at a too strict interpretation of Islamic law without any consideration for the milieu into which Islam originated. The Egyptian Sheikh Muhammad Abduh had maintained that injunctions in the Qura’n relating to the observance of ibadat or tenets of worship were to be followed strictly but those relating to masdaba or rules of living should be interpreted with the consideration of the context they originated in. This is a view that is controversial and still unresolved in Islam. The view again that Islam is a patriarchal religion or misogynistic has been refuted by modern scholarly criticism which has proved that Islam inherited certain perceptions of women from biblical lore. Zayn R. Kassam states that interpretations about women entered Islam through certain strands of early Islamic literature such as the qisas al-anbiya, the asbab al-nuzul, the hadith, the tafsir and the fiqh. These were all oral sources of commentaries i n Islam until they were collated and written quite later. The qisas al-anbiya literally means the â€Å"stories of the prophets† and was a principal source for the entry of biblical lore into Islam perhaps because the earliest Muslims were essentially converts from Judaism and Christianity. The asbab al-nuzul was incorporated into the tafsir, or commentaries on the Qura’n, providing an explanation of