Chirkin, V. E. Islamic Law: Some Social and Legal Indicators

Abstract: According to some researchers, Islamic law is practiced by almost 1.6 billion people which constitutes 24.86% of the global population. 18.5 millions of these people live in Russia. Being a unified system of law, Islamic law has certain branches (depending on different classifications, Sunnites or Shiites living in the same countries or territorial branches of the fundamental classical Islamic law (Oman, Saudi Arabia and others) and a modernized branch (Egypt, Iraq and others). The author of the present article analyzes the nature of Islamic law and branches of Islamic law, peculiarities of the regulation of human rights, social order and public management from the point of civilization, social order, sociocultural approaches and constitutionalism. The author applies the historical method to describe the origin of Islamic law, different interpretations of Islamic law and the role of Islamic law in the modern world. The author also applies the methods of legal analysis of constitutions and other legal sources as well as the comparative analysis to compare Islamic system of law with other world’s legal systems, comparison of different legal systems of Islamic law, methods of synthesis, induction and deduction. The author assumes that Islamic law represents a special type of civilization which retains its grounds in the countries of Islamic fundamentalism (where it retains peculiar elements of semi-feudal nature) but gets dissolved in modernized or ‘advanced’ Islamic countries. According to the authors, differences in Sunnite and Shiite interpretations of law are not that significant in this case and concerns only domestic affairs while the difference between the other two branches are related to the convergence of different legal systems, their mutual influence and antagonisms (the latter is true especially for the countries of the fundamental Islamic law). The author of the article presents an original experience in evaluating Islamic law from the aforesaid points of view.

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