Unit 16 · Law, Ethics and Society

Open the Qur’an anywhere and you will find praise of God, stories of earlier prophets, warnings about the last day and calls to be generous. Only here and there does the text stop and give a rule. Scholars who count the legal verses usually arrive somewhere between two hundred and five hundred, out of roughly 6,236 in the standard Kufan count. The exact number depends on what a reader decides to count. A verse that says ’be just’ can be read as a rule or as a moral appeal.

The legal verses cluster in the surahs Muslims date to Medina, after 622, when the community had to run a town. Surah 2, Al-Baqarah, and Surah 4, An-Nisa, ’Women,’ hold many of them: fasting, pilgrimage, marriage, divorce, inheritance, debts and the treatment of orphans. The Mecca surahs, which come from the earlier years, speak mostly of belief and conduct in general terms. Muslim scholars have long noticed this pattern and used it to date passages.

Because the Qur’an is not arranged as a code, Muslim scholars developed fiqh, jurisprudence, the human effort to work out what God requires in each case. They distinguish fiqh from sharia. Sharia, in the classical sense, is God’s way as scholars understand it to exist; fiqh is the scholars’ understanding, which can be wrong and can differ from one scholar to another. Many modern Muslim writers stress this distinction when the word sharia appears in the news, because a headline about ’sharia law’ often means one fiqh opinion among many.

This chapter follows the method scholars built: what sources they used, how they ranked them, and why the same verse could yield different rulings in Baghdad, Cairo and Cordoba. It ends with how the method is debated now, including by Muslim jurists in the United States. Throughout, the aim is to describe, not to judge: what Muslims have said the law is, and how they have reasoned about it.

The classical Sunni method, usul al-fiqh (the ’roots of jurisprudence’), names four sources and ranks them. First is the Qur’an. Second is the Sunnah, the practice and sayings of Muhammad, known through the hadith reports. Third is ijma', consensus, the agreement of qualified scholars on a question. Fourth is qiyas, analogy, reasoning from a case the texts cover to a case they do not. A jurist works down the list: if the Qur’an is clear, stop; if not, look to the Sunnah; and so on.

The scholar most often credited with setting this order out is Muhammad ibn Idris al-Shafi’i, who died in 820 in Egypt. His book, the Risala, argued that the Sunnah explains the Qur’an and that the Qur’an itself commands obedience to the messenger. He cited 4:59, An-Nisa, which in Pickthall’s 1930 translation calls believers to obey God, the messenger and those in authority. Historians note that jurists before al-Shafi’i used local custom and personal opinion more freely, and that his book helped tie law more tightly to reported hadith.

Analogy is the tool that makes the method stretch. The Qur’an in 5:90, Al-Ma’idah, forbids wine, which the text calls khamr. What about a drink made from dates, or a drug unknown in Arabia? The jurist asks why wine is forbidden. If the reason is that it clouds the mind, then anything that clouds the mind shares the ruling. That ’reason,’ the illa, is the hinge of every analogy, and jurists argued for centuries about how to find it.

Consensus was the most disputed source. Whose agreement counts, and how could anyone know that every qualified scholar in every city agreed? Some limited it to the Prophet’s companions; others accepted the agreement of the scholars of Medina. Shia jurists, as the next lessons show, ranked the sources differently and added the teaching of the Imams. Even within Sunni Islam, the four-source picture was an ideal that real jurists bent to fit their cases.

Islamic law does not sort acts only into legal and illegal. Classical jurists used five categories, the ahkam: obligatory, recommended, permitted, disliked and forbidden. Prayer is obligatory. Extra fasting is recommended. Eating an apple is simply permitted. Wasting food is disliked. Theft is forbidden. Most of life falls into the wide middle, permitted, and jurists often quoted the principle that the default for ordinary things is permission unless a text forbids them.

To place an act, a jurist read the words of the text closely. Does a command in the Qur’an mean ’you must’ or ’you may’? When 62:10, Al-Jumu’ah, tells believers to spread through the land and seek God’s bounty after the Friday prayer, nearly all jurists read it as permission to go back to work, not a duty. When 2:183, Al-Baqarah, says that fasting is prescribed, they read a duty. Grammar, context and the way the Prophet’s companions understood a verse all counted as evidence.

Jurists also asked whether a verse was general or specific, and whether a later verse changed an earlier one. The theory of naskh, abrogation, held that God could replace one ruling with another in the course of the revelation. Wine is the standard example: 2:219 says it has some benefit and great sin, 4:43 forbids prayer while drunk, and 5:90 tells believers to shun it. Most classical jurists read this as a sequence ending in prohibition. Modern scholars differ on how much abrogation there really is; some accept dozens of cases, some very few.

This close reading meant that two careful scholars could reach different rulings from the same verse. That was not seen as failure. A famous saying attributed to the Prophet in Sunni collections holds that a judge who reasons carefully and errs still earns a reward. Classical fiqh made room for disagreement, ikhtilaf, and whole books were written cataloging the differences between the schools.

Sunni Muslims follow one of four madhhabs, schools of law, each named for a scholar of the eighth or ninth century. The Hanafi school looks to Abu Hanifa, who died in 767 in Baghdad and favored careful reasoning and analogy. The Maliki school looks to Malik ibn Anas, who died in 795 in Medina and gave weight to the practice of that city. The Shafi’i school follows al-Shafi’i, who died in 820. The Hanbali school follows Ahmad ibn Hanbal, who died in 855 and preferred hadith over reasoned opinion wherever a report could be found.

Historians stress that none of these men set out to found a school. Their students collected their opinions, and over the next two centuries those collections became organized traditions with their own teachers, books and colleges. By about the year 1000, most Sunni scholars belonged to one of them. Other early schools, such as that of al-Awza’i in Syria, faded away. The four survived, historians suggest, partly because rulers and endowed colleges supported them.

The schools mostly agree on belief and on the pillars of practice. Their differences lie in method and detail: how to weigh a weak hadith, when to use analogy, whether local custom counts, how to hold the hands in prayer. Geography spread them: Hanafis across Turkey, Central Asia and South Asia; Malikis across North and West Africa; Shafi’is in Egypt, East Africa and Southeast Asia; Hanbalis in the Arabian Peninsula. Estimates vary, but the Hanafi school is usually described as the largest.

Sunni scholars have long taught that all four are valid. The Amman Message of 2004, which a later chapter discusses, restated this by listing the schools whose followers count as Muslims. In an American mosque, a Hanafi from Pakistan may pray beside a Maliki from Senegal and a Shafi’i from Indonesia, each following a slightly different form. Muslim writers often point to this as the tradition’s built-in room for difference.

Most Shia Muslims follow the Ja'fari school, named for Ja’far al-Sadiq, the sixth Imam, who died in 765 in Medina. Sunni sources also honor him as a teacher; tradition says that Abu Hanifa and Malik both studied with him. For Shia Muslims, however, the Imams are not only teachers. They are the divinely guided successors of the Prophet, and their sayings carry the authority of the Sunnah. Shia hadith collections therefore include reports from the Imams as well as from Muhammad.

The sources of Ja’fari law are the Qur’an, the Sunnah (of the Prophet and the Imams), consensus and aql, reason. Most Shia jurists rejected Sunni-style analogy, arguing that guessing at God’s reasons is unsafe; they preferred to reason from clear principles. Consensus, in their view, is valid because it reveals the view of the Imam. Shia Muslims believe the twelfth Imam went into hiding in the ninth century and will return, so scholars stand in for him in the meantime.

In practice this made the trained jurist, the mujtahid, central to Shia religious life. Since the eighteenth century, a school of thought called Usuli has held that every believer who is not a jurist must follow a living jurist’s rulings. The most senior are called marja’, ’source of imitation,’ and today several live in Najaf, Iraq, and Qom, Iran. A smaller school, the Akhbari, preferred to rely on the reports of the Imams alone and gave jurists less room.

On most everyday questions, Ja’fari rulings resemble Sunni ones, with some well-known differences in inheritance, temporary marriage and the details of prayer. Sunni and Shia jurists have often criticized one another, and at times persecuted one another, yet the Amman Message of 2004 listed the Ja’fari school among the recognized schools. Describing these differences, and their shared roots, is part of studying the Qur’an’s law fairly.

Ijtihad means effort: a qualified jurist’s independent reasoning from the sources to reach a ruling. Taqlid means following: accepting the settled view of one’s school without redoing the reasoning. Classical scholars agreed that a mujtahid, a jurist able to perform ijtihad, needed deep knowledge of Arabic, the Qur’an, the hadith and the methods of law. An ordinary Muslim, they said, should practice taqlid, just as a patient follows a doctor.

A common story says that the ’gate of ijtihad’ closed around the tenth century, after which Sunni scholars only followed their schools. Historians now doubt this. Wael Hallaq, in a much-cited 1984 article, argued that ijtihad never stopped; jurists kept issuing new rulings on new questions within their schools. What changed was that scholars stopped founding new schools and worked inside the four. The phrase ’closing of the gate’ became popular among modern reformers who wanted to reopen it.

From the nineteenth century on, reformers such as Muhammad Abduh in Egypt argued that Muslims needed fresh ijtihad to meet railways, banks, printing and colonial rule. Some went further and rejected the schools altogether, calling for a return to the Qur’an and hadith alone; the Salafi movement drew on this call. Others defended the schools as a guard against amateurs reading the text however they liked. Both sides quoted the Qur’an and the Prophet’s example.

Today the debate continues in every country with Muslims. Who is qualified to reason from the text? A trained scholar only, or any careful reader? Councils of scholars now issue collective rulings, a kind of shared ijtihad, on organ donation, in vitro fertilization and finance. Muslim writers disagree about whether that is the gate reopening or a new door.

The largest body of Qur’anic law after worship concerns the family. Surah 4, An-Nisa, ’Women,’ and Surah 2 set rules for marriage, the bridal gift that a husband pays to his wife, divorce and the waiting period after it, and the support of children. Verse 4:11 lays out shares of inheritance: in general, a son receives twice a daughter’s share, with fixed portions for parents and spouses. Muslim scholars note that this gave women a guaranteed share at a time when many Arabian women could inherit nothing. Modern Muslim readers debate whether the shares are fixed for all time or tied to an older economy in which men bore all the family’s costs.

Money and trade receive careful attention. The longest verse in the Qur’an, 2:282, tells believers to write down a debt, name the due date and have witnesses. The Qur’an forbids riba, usually translated as usury or interest, in 2:275 and elsewhere. What counts as riba has been argued for centuries; modern Islamic finance builds contracts, such as shared-profit partnerships, that jurists accept as free of it. The Qur’an also demands honest weights and measures (83:1–3, Al-Mutaffifin) and the keeping of contracts (5:1, Al-Ma’idah).

From these verses jurists built the law of contracts: sale, lease, partnership, agency, pledge and gift, each with conditions. A sale required a clear price and a thing that existed and could be delivered; selling fish still in the sea was void because of uncertainty. Historians of law observe that Muslim merchants carried these rules along the trade routes to West Africa, India and Southeast Asia, and that many Muslim-majority countries still draw on them in their civil codes.

Family law is where the Qur’an’s rules touch daily life most directly, and it is where modern reform has been most active. Since the twentieth century, countries from Tunisia to Indonesia have revised marriage and divorce law, some citing new ijtihad, others citing the objectives of the law that a later lesson explains. Muslim scholars stand on many sides of these reforms; describing that range is part of reading the verses accurately.

A small number of Qur’anic verses name a fixed punishment. Classical jurists called these the hudud, ’limits,’ and counted them as offenses against God whose penalties a judge could not change. The Qur’an itself names theft (5:38, Al-Ma’idah: amputation of the hand), highway robbery (5:33), unlawful sexual intercourse (24:2, An-Nur: one hundred lashes), and falsely accusing someone of it (24:4: eighty lashes). Most schools added drinking wine, with a penalty drawn from hadith rather than the Qur’an. Stoning for adultery by a married person appears in hadith, not in the Qur’an’s text; some modern Muslim scholars therefore reject it, and others defend it.

Classical jurists made these penalties very hard to apply. Unlawful intercourse required four eyewitnesses to the act itself; a confession could be withdrawn. Theft required that the goods be above a minimum value, taken from a secure place, and not taken in need; a well-known tradition says the caliph Umar suspended the penalty during a famine. Jurists quoted a hadith telling judges to avert the hudud wherever there was doubt. Historians who study court records from Ottoman and Mughal lands find the fixed penalties applied rarely.

Other crimes fell under qisas, retaliation, and ta'zir, discretionary punishment. For killing or wounding, 2:178 and 5:45 allow retaliation in kind but urge the victim’s family to accept compensation or forgive, and 5:45 says forgiving is an atonement. Most crimes had no fixed penalty at all, and a judge set a punishment he thought fit, which could be a fine, prison or a reprimand.

In the modern world the hudud are among the most disputed parts of Islamic law. Most Muslim-majority countries do not apply them; a few do, and cases there draw wide attention. Some Muslim scholars argue that the conditions of proof cannot be met in a modern state and that the penalties should be suspended; others argue that they are God’s fixed limits. Reading the verses in context means seeing both the text and the centuries of conditions built around it.

Why does the law say what it says? Some jurists asked this question directly and answered that God’s law has purposes, maqasid. Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, who died in 1111, listed five things the law exists to protect: religion, life, intellect, lineage (family) and property. The prohibition of wine protects the mind; the rules of marriage protect the family; the penalty for theft protects property. Al-Ghazali argued that when a text was silent, a jurist could rule in favor of whatever protected these five.

The Andalusian scholar Abu Ishaq al-Shatibi, who died in 1388 in Granada, made the maqasid the center of a whole theory of law. He sorted human needs into three levels: necessities, needs and improvements. He argued that jurists should read the Qur’an’s rules in the light of what they are for, not only in the light of their words. For centuries his work was little read; in the twentieth century it became one of the most cited books in Islamic legal reform.

Modern reformers use the maqasid to argue that a ruling made for one time can be changed to serve the same purpose in another. If the inheritance shares were meant to secure fairness in a world where men paid all the family’s costs, some argue, then fairness now may require different shares. Their critics reply that purposes are easy to invent and that a jurist who reads for purpose may end up overriding the text. Both camps say they are being faithful to the Qur’an.

The maqasid debate is one of the main live questions in Islamic law today, from Cairo’s Al-Azhar university to think tanks in London and Virginia. Reading about it, students can watch a tradition argue with itself about how to read its own book, which is what the study of a sacred text in history mostly looks like.

The word sharia now appears in news stories, laws and campaign speeches, often as a single thing. For Muslim scholars it is not one thing. It is God’s way as they understand it, worked out through fiqh that differs by school, place and century. When a Muslim in Chicago says she follows sharia, she usually means that she prays, fasts, avoids interest on loans where she can, and marries and gives to charity by its rules. When a headline says a country ’imposes sharia,’ it usually means one government’s chosen set of fiqh rules, often the criminal ones.

In the United States, Islamic law has no force as state law. Courts apply American law. Muslim jurists here work in other ways. Since the late twentieth century, bodies such as the Fiqh Council of North America have issued opinions on questions Muslims in America ask: when Ramadan begins, whether a mortgage is allowed, how to handle organ donation. A fatwa, a scholar’s opinion, binds no one; it is advice a Muslim may follow or seek elsewhere. Mosques and Islamic centers in the Chicago area, one of the country’s larger Muslim communities, host scholars who answer such questions.

Some Muslim couples ask an imam or a scholar to mediate a dispute, or write an Islamic marriage contract alongside the civil one. American courts sometimes enforce such contracts as ordinary agreements, the way they enforce other religious contracts. Between 2010 and 2020, several states passed laws banning courts from considering ’foreign law’ or sharia; legal scholars across the spectrum have noted that these laws mostly address a situation that does not arise, since courts already apply the Constitution first.

For a student of the Qur’an, the point is that the same word carries different weights in different mouths. A jurist means a method and a body of reasoning. A government means the rules it has chosen to enforce. A headline may mean a fear. Reading well means asking, each time, which sharia is being discussed and whose reading of the Qur’an stands behind it.

Muslim tradition says that during the Mecca years, before 622, Muhammad’s followers were told to bear persecution without fighting back. The first permission to fight, most commentators say, is 22:39–40, Al-Hajj: permission is given to those who are fought because they have been wronged, who were driven from their homes for saying their Lord is God. The verse adds that if God did not check one people by another, monasteries, churches, synagogues and mosques would be destroyed. Commentators note that the verse names the houses of worship of several faiths.

The fullest early statement is 2:190–194, Al-Baqarah. Verse 190, in Pickthall’s 1930 translation, reads: ’Fight in the way of Allah against those who fight against you, but begin not hostilities. Lo! Allah loveth not aggressors.’ Verse 191 tells the believers to fight the Meccans who had driven them out, but not at the sacred mosque unless attacked there first. Verse 192 says that if they cease, God is forgiving. Verse 193 sets the goal as ending persecution, and verse 194 restates a limit: respond in kind and no more.

Muslim tradition ties these verses to the year 628, when Muhammad and his followers set out to visit Mecca on pilgrimage and feared the Meccans would attack them in the sacred months. Classical commentators such as al-Tabari (d. 923) read ’begin not hostilities’ as a ban on fighting those who do not fight, and many listed women, children, the old and monks as people not to be attacked. Some later jurists argued that verse 190’s limit was abrogated by Surah 9; others, including many modern scholars, hold that it was never abrogated and governs all the rest.

This disagreement about abrogation is the hinge of the whole modern debate. Read one way, the Qur’an’s rule is defense and restraint, with 9:5 a special case. Read the other way, 9:5 replaced the earlier limits. Both readings have classical support, and describing them fairly means showing that Muslims have argued about this since the first centuries.

Surah 9, At-Tawbah, is the only surah that does not open with the basmala, ’In the name of God.’ Muslim tradition dates most of it to 630–631, the last years of Muhammad’s life, after Mecca had submitted and the Muslim community had become the main power in Arabia. Its opening verses declare that God and the messenger are free of obligation toward idolaters who have broken their treaties, and give them four months’ notice. Verse 4 excepts those who have kept their treaties: honor them to their term.

Then comes verse 5, which classical jurists nicknamed the sword verse. It says that when the sacred months have passed, the believers should fight the idolaters wherever they find them, seize them and besiege them; but if they repent, establish prayer and pay the alms, then let them go their way, for God is forgiving. Verse 6 adds that if any idolater asks for protection, he must be granted it, hear the Qur’an and be escorted to safety. Verse 13 describes the target group as people who broke their oaths and attacked first.

Commentators from al-Tabari to Ibn Kathir (d. 1373) read the verse as addressing the Arab tribes who had broken the treaty of Hudaybiyya, made in 628. Some medieval jurists argued that it abrogated every earlier verse urging patience or peace; counts of how many verses it supposedly cancelled ran into the dozens. Others, including the Andalusian Ibn Rushd (d. 1198) in his survey of the schools’ disputes, reported both views without settling them. Most modern Muslim scholars reject the wide abrogation reading and hold that 9:5 concerns a specific enemy at a specific time.

A student who reads only verse 5 sees a command to fight. A student who reads verses 1 to 13 sees a declaration of war against treaty-breakers, with notice, exceptions for those who kept faith, a route to peace through repentance, and safe passage for anyone who asks. Which of those readings the tradition chose was never a single answer, and the choice still shapes arguments today.

Verse 9:29 turns from the idolaters to some of the People of the Book, the Qur’an’s term for Jews and Christians. It commands fighting those among them who do not believe in God and the last day and do not follow the religion of truth, until they pay the jizya and are subdued. Muslim tradition ties the verse to the year 630 and the expedition to Tabuk on the Byzantine border, when Muhammad expected a Byzantine attack. The verse does not name a people; commentators debated whether it meant the Byzantines and their Arab allies or a wider group.

From this verse, together with the Prophet’s treaties with Christian and Jewish towns, jurists built the status of the dhimmi: a non-Muslim under Muslim rule who paid the jizya, a poll tax, and in return kept his religion, property and community courts and was exempt from military service. Historians describe the system as more tolerant than most of medieval Europe and, at the same time, as a system of legal inequality, with restrictions that varied widely by ruler and century. Both descriptions are accurate.

Classical jurists disagreed on details: whether the tax was a penalty or a fee for protection, whether Hindus and Zoroastrians counted as People of the Book, and how much the rate should be. Modern Muslim scholars mostly hold that the dhimmi system belonged to a world of religious empires and that equal citizenship in a modern state serves the Qur’an’s aim of justice better. The 2016 Marrakesh Declaration, signed by hundreds of Muslim scholars, argued exactly that, citing the Prophet’s charter with the people of Medina.

Reading 9:29 in a public school means noting three things: what the verse says, whom Muslim tradition says it addressed, and how the tradition turned it into an institution that changed over time and is now widely reconsidered. It also means noting that a few modern extremist groups have revived the tax as a tool of terror, and that mainstream Muslim scholars have publicly rejected that use.

Surah 8, Al-Anfal, ’The Spoils of War,’ is tied by Muslim tradition to the battle of Badr in 624, the first battle between the Muslims of Medina and the Meccans. Amid verses about courage and the division of spoils sits 8:61, which tells the Prophet that if the enemy inclines toward peace, he should incline toward it too and trust in God. Verse 62 adds that if they mean to deceive, God is enough for him. Commentators read the pair as a command to take peace when it is offered even at the risk of being tricked.

From verses like these, from the Prophet’s practice and from the instructions attributed to the first caliph Abu Bakr, jurists built the rules of war. Muslim tradition reports that Abu Bakr, sending an army to Syria around 632, told the soldiers not to kill women, children or the old, not to cut down fruit trees, not to destroy homes, and to leave monks in their cells alone. Historians note that the report’s wording varies across sources and cannot be confirmed, but jurists cited it for centuries as law.

The classical rules held that only a legitimate authority could declare war, that the enemy must be offered terms first, that noncombatants could not be targeted, that captives must be fed and could not be killed for being captives, and that treaties bound the community even against its interest. A well-known chapter in Ibn Rushd’s handbook compares the schools on each of these points. The rules were not always followed, as historians of any tradition’s wars will note, but they were the law that jurists taught.

Modern Muslim scholars, and international lawyers who study the tradition, point out that these rules overlap heavily with the Geneva Conventions: distinction between soldiers and civilians, humane treatment of prisoners, no unnecessary destruction. That overlap is a main argument in the scholars’ answers to extremist groups, which the last lesson of this chapter takes up.

The Arabic word jihad means striving or struggle. In the Qur’an it is often paired with ’in the way of God.’ In some verses it clearly means armed fighting; in others it means effort of a different kind. Verse 25:52, Al-Furqan, a Mecca surah from before any battle, tells the Prophet to strive against the unbelievers with ’it,’ which commentators take to mean the Qur’an itself: a jihad of argument. Verse 29:69, also from Mecca, promises guidance to those who strive for God’s sake. The Qur’an uses a different word, qital, when it means fighting specifically.

Muslim tradition adds more senses. A saying widely quoted in Sufi and popular literature has the Prophet, returning from battle, say that the community has come back from the lesser jihad to the greater one, the struggle against the self. Many hadith scholars, including Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328), judged that report weak or unfounded; Sufi readers and many modern Muslims cite it anyway as true to the Qur’an’s spirit. Another hadith, better attested, calls speaking a just word before a tyrant the best jihad.

The jurists’ jihad was the armed one, and they treated it as a collective duty under a legitimate ruler, bound by the rules of war. Sunni law manuals placed the chapter on jihad among the duties of the state, not of the individual. Shia jurists mostly held that offensive jihad required the Imam and was suspended during his absence. Neither tradition, in its classical form, allowed private individuals to declare war, which is one point on which scholars’ answers to extremists rest.

In modern usage the word has been pulled in every direction: by militants who claim it, by governments that use it for national wars, by Muslim writers who stress the inner struggle, and by non-Muslims who translate it simply as ’holy war,’ a phrase with no exact Arabic original. A careful reader notes which sense a speaker means and which texts he cites for it.

The Qur’an names no constitution. It does not say ’caliph’ in the political sense, does not describe an election, and does not lay out a state. What it does is set values. Verse 42:38, in a surah called Ash-Shura, ’Consultation,’ praises those whose affairs are decided by shura, mutual consultation. Verse 3:159, Al Imran, tells the Prophet to consult his companions in matters and then, once resolved, to trust in God. Muslim tradition records him doing so before the battle of Uhud in 625, and losing the vote.

Justice is commanded repeatedly. Verse 4:58, An-Nisa, tells believers to restore trusts to their owners and to judge justly when they judge between people. Verse 4:135 tells them to stand firm for justice as witnesses for God even against themselves, their parents or their kin, whether the person is rich or poor. Verse 5:8 goes further: do not let hatred of a people move you away from justice; be just, for that is nearer to piety. Commentators from al-Tabari on have read that verse as binding toward enemies.

From these verses, and from the first four caliphs’ examples as tradition tells them, Muslim political thinkers built very different theories. Medieval jurists such as al-Mawardi (d. 1058) described a caliph chosen by the community’s leaders and bound by the law. Shia thinkers held that rightful leadership belonged to the Imams. Modern writers have argued that shura points to democracy, or to consultation within a monarchy, or to a council of scholars, each citing the same verses. Historians of political thought note that the text underdetermines all of these; the choice is made by the reader’s other commitments.

What the verses do fix, most readers agree, is that authority is a trust, that rulers are under the law, and that justice is owed to everyone, including opponents. Muslim reformers in every century, from medieval jurists writing against tyranny to modern movements for accountable government, have cited 4:58 and 4:135 for this reason.

In 2:30, Al-Baqarah, God tells the angels that he is placing a khalifa on the earth. Pickthall’s 1930 translation renders the word ’viceroy’; others say ’successor’ or ’steward.’ The angels ask whether God will place there one who will do harm and shed blood, and God answers that he knows what they do not. Classical commentators read the khalifa as Adam and his descendants, given charge of the earth on God’s behalf. Modern Muslim environmental writers, from the 1960s on, have read the verse as a charge of stewardship: the earth is held in trust, not owned.

Surah 55, Ar-Rahman, ’The Merciful,’ says in verses 7–9 that God raised the sky and set the mizan, the balance, and tells people not to transgress the balance but to keep it with justice. Surah 7:31, Al-A’raf, tells believers to eat and drink but not to be wasteful, adding that God does not love the wasteful. Surah 21:30, Al-Anbiya, says that God made every living thing from water. These verses, together with the Qur’an’s repeated call to look at rain, seeds, bees and cattle as signs, are the core of a modern Muslim ecology.

In August 2015, Muslim scholars and leaders meeting in Istanbul issued the Islamic Declaration on Global Climate Change, which cited 2:30, 55:7–9 and 7:31 and called on Muslims and their governments to cut fossil fuel use. Islamic environmental groups in the United States, including in the Chicago area, run mosque recycling and energy programs and cite the same verses. The hadith literature adds reports of the Prophet forbidding the waste of water even at a flowing river and planting trees.

Historians of the tradition note that these readings are new emphases on old verses. Medieval jurists wrote about water rights, protected grazing zones called hima and cruelty to animals, but not about a planet in crisis. Whether the Qur’an ’teaches environmentalism’ is therefore a question about how a living tradition reads its book for a new problem, which is exactly what this unit has been studying.

Groups such as al-Qaeda and the self-declared Islamic State have quoted the Qur’an to justify attacks on civilians. Their method, as scholars who study their texts describe it, has a pattern. They quote 9:5 without verses 4, 6 and 13. They claim that the sword verse abrogated every verse of restraint. They declare that any Muslim who disagrees is not a Muslim, a practice called takfir, and that fighting can be declared by anyone, not only a legitimate authority. They treat the medieval dhimmi rules as binding today and the classical protections of noncombatants as void.

Mainstream scholars have answered in public, in detail and often. In September 2014, more than 120 Muslim scholars from many countries signed an open letter to the leader of the Islamic State. It went point by point: it is forbidden in Islam to issue rulings without full knowledge of the sources; to ignore the context of a verse; to kill the innocent, emissaries or journalists; to declare people non-Muslims unless they openly declare unbelief; to declare a caliphate without the consent of all Muslims; and to harm or mistreat Christians or any People of the Book. Each point cited verses and classical jurists.

The answer rests on the same tools this unit has studied. Occasion: 9:5 addresses treaty-breakers in 631. Context: verse 6 grants protection to anyone who asks. Abrogation: most scholars deny that 9:5 cancelled 2:190 or 8:61. Authority: no private person may declare war. Rules: noncombatants are protected, always. Takfir: a hadith reports the Prophet warning that whoever calls a Muslim an unbeliever brings the charge back on himself. Scholars from Al-Azhar, from Shia seminaries and from the Salafi movement itself have made versions of this argument.

None of this settles who is ’really’ a Muslim, which is not a question a public school can answer. What it does show is that the tradition has an inside: a method, a body of rules and a community of readers, and that the argument against extremism is made, most of all, from within it. A student who has read this unit can now follow that argument and see what each side is doing with the text.

In November 2004, King Abdullah II of Jordan issued a statement written with senior scholars, known as the Amman Message. It described Islam as a religion of mercy and justice and rejected extremism. In July 2005, scholars from many countries met in Amman and agreed on three points: that followers of eight named schools of law, the four Sunni schools, the Ja’fari and Zaydi Shia schools, the Ibadi school and the Zahiri school, are all Muslims and may not be declared unbelievers; that takfir against them is forbidden; and that only qualified scholars, following a school’s method, may issue fatwas. By later counts, more than five hundred scholars and leaders had endorsed the three points.

In October 2007, 138 Muslim scholars, leaders and thinkers sent an open letter to the Pope and the heads of the Christian churches. Its title, A Common Word Between Us and You, came from Qur’an 3:64, Al Imran, which calls the People of the Book to a common word: to worship none but God. The letter argued that love of God and love of neighbor are the shared foundation of both faiths, quoting the Qur’an on God’s oneness and on justice to neighbors, and the Gospels’ two great commandments. It asked for peace between the two largest religious communities on earth.

Christian leaders replied in large numbers; Yale, Cambridge and Georgetown hosted conferences on the letter, and church bodies issued formal responses. Scholars who study the document note that it uses the Qur’an’s own method of addressing the People of the Book, quoting 3:64 exactly as the Qur’an frames an invitation, and that it was signed across Sunni and Shia lines. Critics inside and outside Islam have questioned how much it changed on the ground. Both the document and the criticism are part of the record.

Together the two documents make a fitting end to a unit on the Qur’an and law. They show a tradition using its own text and rules to say, in public, who belongs, who may speak for it, and how it wishes to stand toward other faiths. A student can read them as primary sources: what they cite, what they claim, whom they address, and what they leave open.