Shari'ah values for modern societies: analysis of contents and contexts

Many approaches have been explored to explain the concept of Shari‘ah and its values in classical and modern literatures. Some approaches are meant to juxtapose Shari‘ah and its values with other concepts, an attempt that suggests a sense of clash of civilization and advocates superiority of one legal system over another and somewhat echoes egoism and incompatibility (Kelly, 2010; An-Na‘im, 2008). In some cases, Shari‘ah is understood as a restricted corpus of rules of ‘dos and don’ts’ that leads to severe punishments and barbaric discipline when violated. However, such description subjugates Shari‘ah to “obscurantist confinement, medieval stubbornness, and fanaticism” (Ramadan 2001, p.47). Indeed, there is no doubt that Shari‘ah embodies rules and regulations. However, such aspects only form the strictly legalistic notion of Shari‘ah, while they do not exhaust its holistic and comprehensive nature, as it will be further discussed in the rest of this paper