What type of law is Islamic law?

What is Shariʿah? What is Islamic law? As we will see, these are two very different questions, but for now let us assume that these two questions substantially overlap. By asking this, I do not mean what are the rules of Shariʿah or Islamic law, nor am I referencing the constituent sources of each. More fundamentally, the question is, what kind of law is Shariʿah law or Islamic law? In one view, Islamic law represents ‘an extreme case of jurist’s law’, the product of strict casuistic thinking that had little to do with reality, and thus, one can conclude it is not law at all. ¹ However, this view has been thoroughly refuted and can no longer be taken seriously. ² But in another view, Islamic law is a relatively recent colonial invention. As Baudouin Dupret puts it: ‘The idea of transforming Islamic rules into law and, particularly, codified law is the result of an invention rooted in European intervention on the Muslim scene’. ³ Dupret means to say that while Shariʿah represented an Islamic normativity, the rules enunciated through the practice of fiqh did not represent law in the positivist sense of the word. Colonial European powers and their native collaborators projected a very particular cultural paradigm onto the Muslim tradition by inventing the very concept of Islamic law. Thus, per this view, the very idea of Shariʿah as Islamic law is a recent Orientalist invention of the 18th and 19th centuries that was embraced by Muslim natives because of the pervasive influence of colonial powers upon Muslim cultures. ⁴