Sharia

How to spell sharia

6 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce sharia

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does sharia mean?

1. nounThe body of religious law and moral code that governs life in Islam, derived from the Quran and prophetic tradition.

Sharia in a sentence

• The lecture compared sharia with the secular legal codes of Europe.

• Some countries base their family courts on principles drawn from sharia.

Where does sharia come from?

Language of origin: Arabic

This word comes from the Arabic sharia, which literally meant 'the way' or, more vividly, 'the path leading to the watering place', drawn from the root sharaʿa, meaning 'to ordain' or 'to mark out a road'. In a desert culture the route to water was the route to life, so the image of a clear, prescribed path naturally came to stand for a divinely appointed way of living. Within Islam the term developed into the name for the body of religious law derived from the Quran and the example of the Prophet. English began using the word in the nineteenth century as European writers described Islamic legal systems, and it kept its Arabic spelling rather than being remade with native English endings. Because the original Arabic ending can be transliterated in several ways, you will also see the forms 'shariah' and 'shari'a', and that variation is exactly what makes the plain 'sharia' spelling easy to second-guess.

How the word is built

• From Arabic root sh-r-ʿ (sharaʿa, 'to ordain, to lay down a path'); borrowed whole into English with no English prefix or suffix