ABSTRACT
Muslim jurisprudence, however, in its traditional form, provides a much more extreme example of a legal science divorced from historical considerations. Law, in classical Islamic theory, is the revealed will of God, a divinely ordained system preceding and not preceded by the Muslim state, controlling and not controlled by Muslim society. In the sense the traditional picture of the growth of Islamic law completely lacks the dimension of historical depth. From the brief remarks on the nature of the Sharia, it will be evident that the notion of historical process in law was wholly alien to classical Islamic jurisprudence. Legal history, in the Western sense, was not only a subject of study devoid of purpose; it simply did not exist. Islamic legal history, then, does exist. The Sharia may be seen as an evolving legal system, and the classical concept of law falls into its true historical perspective.
