ABSTRACT
Islamic law is among the world's oldest and most widely practiced systems of law. Its influence extends from the Middle East and Southwest Asia to North, West and East Africa and beyond these to Central Asia, Indonesia and Malaysia. The extent of that influence depends on the particular history of each country and current governmental form, whether tending toward the secular or religious. Despite its impact on nearly a quarter of the world's population, Islam, the religion, its law and society are poorly understood and are subjected to incorrect and misleading stereotypes in the West. This is the result of many factors, not the least of which is the historical confrontation between Islam and Christianity and the colonization of large parts of the Arab Islamic world in modern times by Western imperial powers. With a long period of colonialism extending across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the scholarly study of Islam by Western Orientalists lacked a certain objectivity and has been criticized for its ethnocentrism and its anti-Islamic biases (Tibawi, 1963; Said, 1978).
