What is Sharia Law?

Sharia law. The scariest new word of 21st-century American media. A quick google search will expose tons and tons of articles about how this law code is something Muslim and scary, and apparently rural cities in the United States really need to ban it.
So, what is it? Is this Islamic law code really the boogeyman we think it is? Let’s take a dip into Sharia, the Islamic legal system.

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Step Back is a history channel releasing videos weekly that endeavours to go past the names, dates, and battles you might find elsewhere. It invites you to take a step back, consider the past and how it connects to today. We search for the quirky, unconventional, and just plain weird parts of our collective story.

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Special Thanks to Kelly Barnes, Benny Tan, and Andres Urso

Pictures:
~crystalina~

Selected Sources:
-Bhala, Raj. Understanding Islamic law: Sharīʻa. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2016.
-Otto, J.M. Sharia and national law in Muslim countries: tensions and opportunities for Dutch and EU foreign policy. Amsterdam: Leiden University Press, 2011.
-Krawietz, Birgit. Islam and the rule of law: between sharia and secularization. Sankt Augustin: Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, 2008.

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Please watch: "Is America REALLY a Democracy?"
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[starmaker]

Oh boy the comment section is really going to be really fun in this.

[iammrbeat]

Happy birthday! (The last kind words before the trolls come)

[SecretlySentient]

You did a really great job of making theocracy sound totally innocuous!
But sarcasm aside, your content seems high quality and I’ll subscribe.

[TeddyFills]

Thank you for this video. As an atheist raised in a Islamic country (but not religious household), it helped me link names and concepts I had heard of but never made sense. Most important, it made me realise how much I should learn about the Islamic tradition the same way I know about the Catholic one, in order to criticize it fairly. Thank you for your work

[MrKillfield]

I'm sure this will be a very civil comment section

[ReligionForBreakfast]

Great vid. Very tough topic, but you handle it well. Academic study of religion for the win.

[ultrademigod]

You seemed to have missed all the rules that non Muslims are forced to follow in a Sharia run country.

[heshamhejazi]

I am Egyptian, and I studied elementary, middle and high school in Yemen, and I think that I have acquired a good general knowledge of Sharia, which according to what I understand is basically based on the commands and prohibitions in the Qur’an and Sunnah (the Sunnah includes the sayings of the Messenger - may God’s prayers and peace be upon him - and his actions)
Followed by the importance (consensus and measurement)
There are some other methods for deriving laws, but they are not agreed upon by all the jurists, such as (the sayings of the Companion, the approval, blocking the pretexts, the companionship, the custom, the law before, the sent interests, and others), but in the end all follow the Qur’an and the Sunnah.

As for the Penal Code, as I understand it, it works to protect society from several aspects: (Protecting the belief: the penalty for apostasy), (Protecting life: the penalty for murder), (Protecting honor: the penalty for adultery), (Protecting money: the penalty for theft), (Protecting the mind: Punishment for drinking alcohol), and the application of those penalties is only possible with specific conditions, according to what we have studied

[ZWhippie]

well, the Taliban winning Afganistan is scary as any theocracy should be.

[akirubamiru]

You are the first non-muslim guy who explain Sharia law in the most accurate way. I think that take from you lot of effort. Respect from a Muslim!

[DaglasVegas]

common law and civil law are not equivalent to Islamic sharia law because they are a secular set of laws.
If anything is an equivalent it is the Christan Canonic & ecclesiastical law in the middle ages or Jewish Halacha in orthodox Jewish communities.
Sharia law is scary because we know what happens when there is no separation between state and religion, and It's a very good thing that Christian equivalent to Sharia has become virtually extinct form civil legislatons today.
time for the Jewish and Muslim versions to disappear as well.

[tengokuro]

Happy birthday my friend! You make incridible vídeos, amd i hope you'll become much more successful in the future, cheers ;)

[SmFZaman]

Muslim here. Good job! Very fact based, and not pandering to "popular" opinions.

[hilmansudirman]

Well don't forget about the aposthasy, it's punishable by

[bittersaint]

A phobia of Islam is an irrational fear of Islam. And yet you stated that our primary fear is reasonable. Espescially in consideration of the rise of islam oriented terror attacks primarily originating from repressive countries and/or destabilized countries.

[thanosandnobill]

Fun fact, Greece is the only country in Europe who has sharia law (legally and approved by the state) at one of its regions.

[marcusgomez]

Sharia law would be absolutely terrible in a nation when free choice is king. Religious laws have no place in society in America.

[Megumi_Bandicoot]

I didn't even watch the video. I just needed to read the title to know where the comment section is heading...

[mosleyman]

In the U.K. we have Sharia councils and they are not welcome here yet the government lets them carry on. You should always follow the law of the land not your own religious law.

[Pfhorrest]

Might have been good to also make comparisons to the old Catholic canon law, in the days when "Christendom" was a real political thing. Interestingly, it also had prohibitions on interest, and an industry of elaborate workarounds trying to circumvent that (hinging, like Muslim banking does, on the failure to recognize rent and interest as fundamentally the same kind of thing, so you can get an effectively-interest-bearing loan by complicatedly rolling a rental contract into it).