In Islam, sharia is held infallible but fiqh, its human interpretation, can change
Muslims regard sharia, the divine law, as perfect and unchanging. Fiqh is something different: the human effort to understand that law, built by jurists who interpret the Quran and the Prophet's example. Because it is human, fiqh is openly considered fallible, and it has shifted across fourteen centuries.
The Arabic word means deep understanding or full comprehension. In practice it covers rituals, morals and social rules as well as economic and political questions. Scholars trained in it are called fuqaha, and a jurist who derives new rulings through independent reasoning, ijtihad, is a mujtahid. The historian Ibn Khaldun defined fiqh as knowing God's rules for human actions, sorted into five grades: required, sinful, recommended, disapproved and neutral.
The discipline has two halves. Usul al-fiqh, the roots, is the method of interpretation; furu al-fiqh, the branches, is the body of specific rulings that method produces. A decisive figure was Muhammad ibn Idris ash-Shafi'i, who lived from 767 to 820 and set out four roots of law in his book ar-Risala: the Quran, the sunnah, consensus and analogy. He insisted the core texts be read by objective rules grounded in the study of Arabic. Later centuries added secondary tools such as juristic preference, local custom and the principle of blocking means that lead to harm.
Historians usually divide the story into eight periods. After Muhammad's death in 11 AH came an era of personal interpretation by his companions, then a rivalry between a tradition-minded approach in western Arabia and a more rationalist one in Iraq. The golden age, from the early second to mid-fourth Islamic century, saw the major Sunni and Shi'i schools take shape. A long stagnation followed the fall of Baghdad in 1258, until the Ottomans codified Hanafi law in 1876.
Today four prominent Sunni schools survive, along with two or three Shi'a ones. The modern Arabic word can even describe secular law, though writers note it would be odd to call an American judge an expert in fiqh.
Source: Fiqh
