Ephemeral Sharia
Religion, the way dominant religious doctrines define it, is reduced to a package of do's and don'ts, also known as religious law, Halakhah, divine law, or Sharia; and a devout person is lowered to the level of a robot who strictly executes such package. Yet it is not explained that what such small details have anything to do with eternal salvation, which was supposedly the biggest promise of religion. In the case of Islam in particular, most of this package (Sharia) is derived from Hadith, i.e., the quotes and stories attributed to Mohammad (pbuh), which is not part of Islam as we we explained in the article
Islam without Hadith. In fact the first reaction to the view of Islam without Hadith was saying "there would be nothing left from Sharia!", or asking "without such details how would Islam be even different from other religions?". In the article
Abrahamic Islam we showed that from Quran's perspective Islam is for reviving the same old message that is repeated in all previous religions, and was not supposed to be taken as something new or different. We further explained that salvation is not attained by details of this Sharia or that Sharia, and that mistaking Sharia for religion is the unfortunate result of perversions in the dominant religious doctrines. In the article
Islam without Hadith we explained that from Quran's perspective such details are left to be implemented by each people, according to the conditions of the particular time and place in which they are actually living.
The main criticism of this view is that Sharia is not a notion that is born with Islam; it rather has a long history in Abrahamic religions, where most notable are the Ten Commandments. Quran also mentions some ancient people that were punished by divine retribution after disregarding some commands sent to them. Along the same lines we have some imperative sentences addressed to believers in Quran, which in some cases are expressed with a distinctive cautionary tone such as limits of God [
2:229]. Since the cautionary tone reminds of the divine retributions, the imperative sentences could also be of the same nature as the commands sent to ancient people, hence leading us to the notion of Sharia for the followers of Muhammad (pbuh): some eternal laws that must be followed to be safe from divine retribution or eternal damnation.
In this article we show that Quran contains no indication of an eternal package of do's and don'ts, i.e., Sharia. First, using Quran we illustrate the distinction between the abstract religious notions that is shared by all religions and their implementations that differ from time to time and place to place, and show that the implementations reflected in Quran cannot be assumed to be free from the conditions of the time and place for which they were specified. Then we argue that the strong cautionary tone used for some of the implementations reflected in Quran is not indicative of them being eternal; it is rather proportional to the extreme ungratefulness of disregarding the implementation despite the direct intervention of God for specifying it. We then discuss why such ephemeral implementations are reflected in the timeless Quran. Using this perspective, we then review the implementations reflected in Quran, and we show that if one reads Quran with an open mind that is not yet biased by the Sharia-centric culture, she would not be lead to the notion of Sharia as it is understood by the dominant religious doctrines, i.e., an eternal package of do's and don'ts that is the key to salvation.
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