Origin 700 to 1000 CE
Sharia is the divinely given way. Fiqh is the accumulated human effort to understand and state it. That distinction is basic in Islamic scholarship and it is almost always lost in English usage, where "sharia" is applied to the rulings of jurists, to the codes of modern states, and to the divine law itself as though these were one thing. They are not, and Muslim jurists have always maintained that fiqh is fallible, revisable and plural precisely because it is human.
The plurality is institutional. Sunni Islam has four surviving schools of law, Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi'i and Hanbali, each named for an early jurist, each dominant in particular regions, and each regarding the others as legitimate. Twelver Shia jurisprudence, the Ja'fari school, differs in its sources and in admitting reasoning in a form the Sunni schools do not. Zaydis and Ibadis have their own. Disagreement among the schools is not a scandal within the system; it is the system.
Its scope is much wider than a Western reader expects from the word "law". The jurists classify every human act on a five-point scale from obligatory through recommended, neutral and disapproved to forbidden, and most of what they discuss is worship, purity, marriage, inheritance, contract and diet rather than crime. The penal provisions that dominate Western coverage, the hudud, a small set of offences with fixed scriptural punishments, occupy a very small part of the classical manuals and were hedged by evidentiary requirements so demanding that classical jurists made conviction extremely difficult.
What changed the character of the whole thing was the modern state. Codification, beginning with the Ottoman civil code compiled in the 1870s and continuing through the national legal systems of the twentieth century, turned a scholarly, plural and non-state jurisprudence into statute enacted and enforced by governments. This is a transformation rather than an application. A classical jurist issued an opinion that bound no one by force; a modern penal code does. Debates that treat contemporary state enforcement as simply the implementation of classical law, whether conducted by its advocates or its opponents, are missing that discontinuity.
Most Muslim-majority states today apply religious law only to personal status, marriage, divorce, inheritance, custody, with civil and criminal law derived from European codes. A smaller number have criminal provisions drawn from the classical penal categories in force, among them Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan under Taliban rule, Brunei, Mauritania, Yemen, Qatar, twelve northern states of Nigeria, and the province of Aceh in Indonesia, whose ordinance is unusual in applying to non-Muslims as well. The direction of travel is not uniform: Sudan repealed a substantial part of its 1991 provisions in 2020, and the United Arab Emirates removed corporal hudud penalties from its penal code the same year, while Brunei brought a fuller code into force in 2019. Practice varies widely between what is on the statute book and what is enforced, and current detail is best taken from bodies that track it annually rather than from any general statement.