الشريعة
al-Sharīʿa
The whole body of God’s law in Islam: its worship and ritual, its ethics, and its legal rules.
What it means
Al-Sharīʿa originally meant the path to a watering place. The Quran uses it of the way God sets for a community: “Then We put you on a clear way (sharīʿa) of the matter, so follow it” (45:18). Faruqi defines it as the collective name for all the laws of Islam, including its religious and liturgical, ethical and legal systems. The sharia is therefore wider than a penal code. It covers prayer, fasting and charity, family life, business, and conduct toward neighbours, and each act is placed in one of five classes: required, recommended, permitted, disliked or forbidden.
Often misunderstood as
In popular English “sharia” is reduced to harsh punishments, although criminal penalties form a small part of a system that is mainly about worship, ethics and daily dealings.
What the sources say
Scholars of the four Sunni schools and others agree on the general aims of the law, which later jurists such as al-Ghazali and al-Shatibi summed up as protecting religion, life, intellect, lineage and property. The details of rulings vary by school and by period.
Term and Arabic as listed in Ismail al Faruqi, Toward Islamic English (International Institute of Islamic Thought, 1995), p. 36, listed as AL SHARĪ'AH. The definition is restated here.