‘Islamic law’ covers all aspects of human behaviour. It is much wider than the Western understanding of ‘law’, and governs ‘the Muslim’s way of life in literally every detail and, of course, it also regulates commercial transactions. It follows that the Islamic conceptual framework is quite unlike that of Christianity in which law is secular. There is no Christian law of contract, for example, no Christian law of property, whereas bodies of law dealing with such matters do exist in the shari’a –the ‘legal’ verses of the Koran and the traditions of the Prophet.
The shari’a has long been abandoned and substituted by Western law. However, as a result of the Islamic revival, the possibility of adapting the shari’a to the modern world has been considered recently.