The Islamic Law or Shariah possesses a number of special features or characteristics. They are as follows:
Perfection and Comprehensiveness:
The first characteristic of the Shariah is its perfection and comprehensiveness, which distinguishes it from the Western concept of law. It applies itself to all human activities. As Allah says in the Quran: “He is Allah in the heavens and in the earth. He knoweth both your secrets and your utterance, and He knoweth what ye earn”. (6:3) The Shariah is an all- inclusive legislation. It is capable of meeting all changes and all challenges of the Muslim, individual and collective. It is a perfect code of life, which makes it superior to all man-made codes of law. The Encyclopaedia Britannic a, in its 1967 edition, says: Under the Shariah “every act or omission falls under one of its five categories: what is commanded or positively forbidden by Almighty God. To the Muslims, therefore, the
Shariah includes all that a Westerner would term law—public and private, national and international—and a great deal which he would not regard as law at all, such as the details of religious ritual and the ethics of social conduct.”
Spiritual Loftiness:
The Shariah embodies spiritual loftiness. This characteristic is not and cannot be found in the secular law of the West. Spiritual loftiness means that the injunctions of the Shariah always aim at the good of the whole Muslim community, and for the moral good and salvation of the individual, for they are ordained by the Divine Supreme Being. The Shariah always keeps the door open for the eternal betterment of the Muslim community.
Stability and Development:
Islamic Law combines the dual features of stability, on -the one hand, and development or change, on the other. This feature makes it at once a stable system of human relations and at the same time capable of developing under the varied and changing conditions of Muslim life and society. In other words, it is both rigid and elastic system of law. Its stability is derived from the Commandments of the Quran and Sunnah, from which it originated and its elastic features come from its interpretative principles of the ijma, ijtihaad, qiyas, and istihsan, which we shall explain later on.
They will make it responsive to the group requirements at various places and in different ages. In short, the Shariah provides a permanent sacred framework beyond which no Muslim can go. But at the same time it provides considerable variation within these limits. The late Dr. I.H.Qureshi, the well-known Pakistani political thinker, has expressed the immutable and the dynamic features of the Shariah as thus: “The Shar includes within its fold three main principles: two immutable and one mutable. The immutable principles are the Quran and the authentic Hadith of the Prophet; the latter according to the Muslims is not so much an enlargement as an interpretation of these principles which has been arrived at by the application of human reason to apply them to the changing needs of humanity in different conditions. It is wrong, therefore, to say that the Shar’ is entirely immutable.”