Sharia law (Arabic: شريعة‎ šarīʿah, IPA: [ʃaˈriːʕa], "legislation"; sp. shariah, sharīʿah; also Islamic law, قانون إسلامي qānūn ʾIslāmī) is the moral code and religious law of Islam. Sharia deals with many topics addressed by secular law, including crime, politics and economics, as well as personal matters such as sexual intercourse, hygiene, diet, prayer, and fasting. Though interpretations of sharia vary between cultures, in its strictest definition it is considered the infallible law of God—as opposed to the human interpretation of the laws (fiqh).

There are two primary sources of Islamic law: the precepts set forth in the Quran, and the example set by the Islamic prophet Muhammad in the Sunnah. Where it has official status, sharia is interpreted by Islamic judges (qadis) with varying responsibilities for the religious leaders (imams). For questions not directly addressed in the primary sources, they extend the application of sharia through consensus of the religious scholars (ulama) thought to embody the consensus of the Muslim Community (ijma). Islamic jurisprudence will also sometimes incorporate analogies from the Quran and Sunnah through qiyas, though Shia jurists prefer reasoning ('aql) to analogy.

Mona Siddiqui OBE (born 1963) is a British Muslim academic. She is Professor of Islamic Studies and Public Understanding at the University of Glasgow, as well as the Director of its Centre for the Study of Islam, and is a member of the Commission on Scottish Devolution.

She is also a regular contributor to Thought for the Day and Sunday on BBC Radio 4, and to The Times, The Scotsman, The Guardian, Sunday Herald and (since February 2007, as its first regular Muslim columnist) The Tablet.

Siddiqui was born in Karachi, Pakistan in 1963. Her parents were religious and the family prayed and read the Qur'an together. The family moved from Pakistan to England in 1968. Her father was a psychiatrist and moved to England to carry out post-graduate work in Cambridge, and his work eventually took the family to Huddersfield when he gained a substantive job there. The family lived in four successive houses in Huddersfield, moving partly because the family expanded from four to six, and finally into a 1930s detached house in a relatively prosperous area near the town centre. The household was very literary and there were many books in the house. Siddiqui became closest to her sister about seven years younger than herself. Urdu was generally spoken at home, and so the children became bilingual. Her father also spoke Arabic and worked in Saudi Arabia for a few years, where he was visited by Siddiqui at the age of about 18 years together with her sister.

Nonie Darwish (Arabic: نوني درويش‎) (born 1949) is an Egyptian-American human rights activist, and founder of Arabs For Israel, and is Director of Former Muslims United. She is the author of two books: Now They Call Me Infidel; Why I Renounced Jihad for America, Israel and the War on Terror and Cruel and Usual Punishment: The Terrifying Global Implications of Islamic Law. Darwish's speech topics cover human rights, with emphasis on women's rights and minority rights in the Middle East. Born in Egypt, Darwish is the daughter of an Egyptian Army lieutenant general, who was called a "shahid" by the Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, after being killed in a targeted killing by the Israeli Defense Forces in 1956. Darwish blames "the Middle Eastern Islamic culture and the propaganda of hatred taught to children from birth" for his death. In 1978, she moved with her husband to the United States, and converted to Christianity there. After the September 11, 2001 attacks, she has written on Islam-related topics.