Sharia means “the path.” You've heard it painted as pure medieval terror, or waved off as nothing but prayer and charity. Most of it is prayer, fasting, charity, marriage and trade. The friction the world argues about lives in a smaller part: the fixed criminal punishments, and the law's treatment of women, apostates and non-Muslims. Here is the structure, the sources, and where it is enforced today: in law, in named states, right now.
Sharia is not a single code in a book. It is God's law as derived by scholars from the Qur'an and the Sunna (Muhammad's example), worked out over centuries into fiqh (jurisprudence) through several schools that often disagree. It governs worship, diet, family, finance, war and the state. Most of it is uncontroversial ritual and ethics. This page stays on the parts that collide with universal human rights, with the limits and the diversity held in view alongside the hard edges. The scripture behind each ruling is on our Islamic texts page.
Classical Sunni law draws on four roots: the Qur'an; the Sunna (the Prophet's words and deeds, recorded in hadith); ijmaʿ (scholarly consensus); and qiyas (reasoning by analogy). From these the jurists of each madhhab (school) derived rulings. There is no single church and no central authority, which is why a question can have four orthodox answers, and why “Sharia” in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Indonesia and a British mosque can mean very different things in practice.
A small set of crimes carry punishments the classical tradition treats as fixed by God (ḥudūd, “the limits”), beyond a judge's power to soften. These are the laws Islamist states and movements (the Taliban, ISIS, and the penal codes of several countries) revive in full.
“As for the thief, the male and the female, amputate their hands.”
Qur'an 5:38The Qur'an sets 100 lashes for zina (24:2); the Sunna adds stoning to death for married offenders (Bukhari & Muslim).
Qur'an 24:2 · Ṣaḥīḥ Bukhari/Muslim“Whoever changes his religion, kill him.” The death penalty for leaving Islam is the ruling of all four Sunni schools and Jaʿfari law.
Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhari 3017For ḥiraba (banditry / “corruption in the land”): “that they be killed or crucified, or their hands and feet cut off from opposite sides, or exiled.”
Qur'an 5:33Beyond the hudud, classical law builds in structural inequalities that several states still encode, the ones most often defended as “different, not unequal.”
In financial matters: “two witnesses from among your men… or a man and two women”: one woman's testimony counts as half a man's.
Qur'an 2:282“For the male, what is equal to the share of two females.” The basis for a son inheriting twice his sister's portion.
Qur'an 4:11“Fight… until they pay the jizya while humbled.” Jizya was a tax paid by Jews and Christians in exchange for protection under Muslim rule; it came bundled with dhimmi status, meaning legally protected but subordinate, barred from testifying against Muslims and marked by distinct dress in some periods.
Qur'an 9:29Insulting God or the Prophet is a capital matter in classical law and in the penal codes of Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia and others, used against minorities and reformers, most visibly Asia Bibi, a Pakistani Christian sentenced to death for blasphemy in 2010 and held on death row for eight years before an international campaign won her acquittal in 2018, over riots demanding she hang.
Classical fiqh on sabb al-rasul · Pakistan Penal Code §295-CNo classical school fixed a minimum age for marriage; the precedent cited is the Prophet's own marriage to Aisha at six, consummated at nine. Iran's Civil Code (Art. 1041) still permits marriage at 13 for girls, younger with court and guardian consent.
Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhari 5134, 3894, 5133, 5158 · Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim 1422Most Muslim-majority countries run civil and criminal codes of European origin, applying Sharia mainly to family law (marriage, divorce, inheritance). A minority enforce the full criminal Sharia, including hudud:
Apostasy is a capital crime in the law of roughly a dozen states; stoning for adultery remains on the books in several. These are not medieval relics. The Taliban resumed public floggings and executions after 2021, and Brunei adopted stoning for gay sex and adultery in 2019.