DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SHARIAH AND DEEN

God gave different methods to His prophets to accommodate the different circumstances. that method can be proper that takes into account the prevailing circumstances. For example, Prophet Joseph directly told the ruler of Egypt “Place in my charge the storehouses of the land” (THE QURAN 12: 55), but Prophet Moses did not make this sort of demand on the king of that country. On the contrary, he asked for permission to depart from Egypt, taking along with him his people, the Children of Israel. (THE QURAN 26: 17) It is wrong to claim that the differences in the shariahs of different prophets were on account of evolution—that the rudimentary shariah of the earlier prophets kept getting refined till the finally-evolved shariah was given to the final prophet, the Prophet Muhammad. The above cited Quranic verse rebuts the evolutionary explanation of different shariahs to different prophets. According to the Quran, the differences in the shariah are on the basis of God’s testing people, and not on account of the supposed evolution of shariah laws. Every act of worship has a spirit as well as an external form. Those who gather around a prophet and adopt a life of faith know this difference, and hence are more particular about the spirit of worship. But in later generations, stagnation gradually sets in, and people lose the inner spirit of worship. The performance of external forms of worship in a ritualistic manner is mistaken as true worship. When stagnation sets in and a community loses the spirit of worship, God commands, through His prophets to changes in some external forms of worship. Thereafter, those who had taken the external forms to be the real thing continue to cling onto these ancient forms, unable to adopt the new forms of worship. They even deny the prophets of their times. But those in whom the spirit of deen (religion) is alive give no importance to the external differences and willingly adopt the new. This is precisely what happened in ancient Madinah, when, through Prophet Muhammad, the qibla or direction of worship was changed (2: 142). Such changes in shariah are brought about through prophets. Now, no changes are possible in the external forms of worship that Islam prescribes, because no new prophet will come. However, as far as minhaj or method is concerned, the case is different.