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Abstract
The passing of time requires that continual decision-making on norms is an essential condition to constitute and to process social normative orders, including legal orders. The idea of a divine law, whose norms are constituted by God determining social normative order for evermore, conflicts with the nature of law. As time passes and thus social environment changes, actors have to decide on God’s decisions while at the same time those decisions contradict the idea of an immutable normative order, causing a reluctance of decision-making. As the genesis and development of Islamic law bears witness to the struggle to process divine law against time, the ramifications of this conflict have increased since the onset of modernity. Whereas scholars of usul al-fiqh and Islamic law usually take a jurists’ perspective, drawing on legal positivist theories, to explain the concept of shariʿa and its modern manifestations, this chapter takes a non-normative approach and explores, based on a sociological theory of normative orders and law, Islamic normativity beyond the realm of jurisprudence. This chapter argues that the main features of shariʿa and its contemporary social manifestations are the result of the unsolved conflict between the necessity and the desistence of decision-making in Islam.