It cannot be overstated that, for over a millennium, the Sharīʿa represented a complex set of social, economic, moral and cultural relations that permeated the epistemic structures of the social and political orders. It was a discursive practice in which these relations intersected with each other, acted upon each other and affected one another in multiple ways. Involving institutions, groups and processes that resisted, enhanced and dialectically affected each other, this discursive practice manifested itself as much in the judicial process as in writing, studying, teaching and documenting. It involved a political representation in the name of Sharīʿa values, and strategies of resistance against political and other abuses, as well as a cultural rendering of law in practice, where cultural categories meshed into fiqh, legal procedure, moral codes and much else. It involved a deeply moral community which law, in its operation, took as granted, for it is a truism that the Sharīʿa itself was constructed on the assumption that its audiences and consumers were, all along, moral communities and morally grounded individuals. It involved a complex and sophisticated intellectual system in which the jurists and the members of the legal profession were educators and thinkers who, on the one hand, were historians, mystics, theologians, logicians, men of letters and poets, and, on the other, contributed to the forging of a complex set of relations that at times created political truth and ideology while at other times it confronted power with its own truth.