Islamic law

broadly, legal systems that try to effect Allah's will for the Muslim. Law is here very closely related to religion. The Quran, or Koran, is at its heart. To the outsider at least, the law appears to try to serve the will of Allah every bit as much as other aspects of practice. Traditionally, the law is fixed, and it is not intended that it should shift and change according to the wishes of the citizen – in this respect not unlike Western law in times when the Churches were very closely entwined with the state. Nonetheless, its history shows all the signs of great intellectual effort, with the existence of different schools and interpretative techniques not that removed from features observable in the history and development of Roman law. Today, many aspects of the sharia, the body of its doctrines, in many states have been overwhelmed by Westernisation, sometimes by what traditionalists might see as illegitimate interpretative techniques but yet in others there has been fundamental reinstatement.