In Muslim thought, sharia is God's eternal way for human life, known in full only to God; what people call sharia in practice is fiqh, the centuries of fallible human jurisprudence that tries to understand and derive it. Plural, revisable, and overwhelmingly concerned with worship and everyday conduct rather than the harsh punishments of Western caricature, it is drawn from the Quran and the Prophet's example through schools of law that disagree among themselves — and its meaning is fiercely contested in the modern age of nation-states.
Ask what sharia says about almost anything, and the honest answer begins with a distinction most people never hear. Sharia is the divine ideal: God's path for how to live, complete and unchanging, but known in full only to God. What human beings actually possess is fiqh — the long, fallible labor of scholars trying to understand that path and turn it into rules. So every concrete ruling, judgment, or fatwa ever called 'sharia' has passed through human interpretation — plural, argued-over, and revisable, not a single fixed code handed down intact. The schools of law disagree with one another, often sharply, on what God requires. Most of what they argue about is prayer, fasting, marriage, charity, and trade. The harsh criminal punishments that fill the Western imagination are a small, hedged-about corner of a vast tradition that is mostly about how to worship and how to be decent.