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Episode 118, the Quran, Part 2, Ordinances.

In this program, we will discuss the legalistic materials in the Quran.

The many suras of the Quran set out rules for food and drink, contracts, inheritance, slaves,

marriage and divorce, criminal law, prayer, pilgrimage, and more.

All told, the Ayatol Akam, or legal verses, make up just a few hundred of the Quran's

6,200 or so verses, a fairly small swath of what's in the book.

As small in number as the legal verses of the Quran are, they have been of

substantial juristic interest in Islam since the 7th century, and their rulings affect the lives of

hundreds of millions of people today. Islamic law is a mountainous subject. After 1,300 years in development, it exists today in seven predominant

schools, four Sunni, two Shia and one Ibadi, along with some variations. Each school has its own

sizable body of literature, and Islamic law more generally has an expansive dictionary of special terminology.

Islamic law in practice has always involved both drawing from the Quran and often the Hadiths,

or literature about the life of Muhammad, as well as the exercise of human reason.

By the time of the Abbasid caliphate, the Quran and Hadith texts were

already a gigantic, varied body of work, as gigantic and varied as the territories of the Islamic

empires. As enormous as the Quran and Hadiths were, though, they didn't cover everything. The legal scholars, or muftis,

of early Islamic history, thus needed to do a lot of thinking and writing to come up with

legal decisions, and by the end of the 800s, book cases full of Islamic legal literature

had been born. Present-day Iraq, after all, was a different territory than present-day Iran and Israel,

Tunisia, and Andalusia.

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