ABSTRACT
The Islamic sharica is central to Islam in the minds of most Muslims and nonMuslim schalars. In many ways, the centrality of the Islamic sharica has increased in recent decades. Y et despite-or perhaps because of -this centrality, the precise, even the general, role of the sharica in Islamic societies is the subject of contentious debate among Muslims. Outside of and underlying such debates are more subtie and rarely articulated differences about the meaning of the lslamic sharica. In this essay, I will put forward a general intellcctual map for those varying meanings. More critically, I will suggest that important shifts in the meaning of the Islamic sharica have taken place in the Muslim world, and that these shifts are closely connected to the nature and viability of legal and educational institutions associated with the lslamic sharica in the past. As the Islamic sharica has become disconnected fromthese institutions, its meaning has changed in some fundamental ways. Most important, the sharica is approached less for its process than for its content And because the shift in institutions and understanding has received much less attention from Muslims, widespread attempts to re-create older relationships (particularly invalving the relationship between the Islamic sharica and the state) in fact involve a deepening rather than a counteracting of the transformation in the Islamic sharica.
