ABSTRACT
In the post-colonial period, most contemporary Muslim countries adopted either the French-based civil law system or some version of the British common law system and limited the application of Islamic law to personal law matters, particularly in the fields of inheritance and family law. The fact that the nature of the connection or relationship of any of these purportedly Islamically based or Islamized laws to the Islamic legal tradition remains debatable. Islamic law is best described as the process of a practiced discipline of deliberative and purposeful practical reasoning in which rulings are developed primarily through analogical dynamics. The practical sources are the actual premises and processes utilized in legal practice in the process of producing positive rules and commandments. The Islamic legal tradition was founded on a markedly pluralistic, discursive and exploratory ethos that became the very heart of its distinctive character.
