ABSTRACT
Human intellectual intervention is required to bring out the legal content or actual rules in many of the Quranic verses. In particular, whether human reason could provide a separate source or a legal authority beyond direct references to the revelation and God’s expressed or indirectly discovered will. That is, whether there is an element of natural law in Islamic law. The scholars of Islamic law clearly recognized that the formulation of the practiced law had a human as well as a divine element. There has however been a discussion about how to conceptualize that, in particular what exactly is meant by the terms SharIa and fiqh. In 1971, under president Sadat, the phrase ‘and the principles of the Islamic SharIa is a main source for legislation’ was added. With the rise of Islamism and political Islam, in particular from the 1970s, such modernity was challenged by political forces that called for the ‘restoration of the SharIa.
