Case studies of Alcohol/ tobacco prohibition implementation aspects at the end.

Q: can you define shariah?

A:

Shariah is the Islamic legal and ethical framework derived primarily from the Qur’an and the Sunnah (the sayings, actions, and approvals of Prophet Muhammad ﷺ), supplemented by scholarly methodologies like ijma (consensus) and qiyas (analogical reasoning).

It covers far more than “law” in the narrow Western sense — it encompasses worship (salah, fasting, zakat, hajj), personal conduct and ethics, family and marriage matters, business and financial dealings, criminal justice, and governance. The word itself literally means “the path to water” or “the way,” reflecting its role as a guide to living in accordance with divine will.

Fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) is the human scholarly effort to understand and derive practical rulings from Shariah, which is why different schools of thought (madhahib) — like Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’i, and Hanbali — can reach varying conclusions on specific issues while all drawing from the same core sources.

Q: who is the law giver in Islam; ie Ash-Shari’ (الشارع) — “The Lawgiver” 

A:

Ash-Shari’ (الشارع) — “The Lawgiver” — refers to the one who establishes and legislates the Shariah. In Islamic legal theory (usul al-fiqh), this term is central to understanding where law and authority come from.

Primary meaning: Allah as Ash-Shari’

Allah is the ultimate Lawgiver — the sole source of legislative authority in Islam. Rulings (ahkam) are only binding as religious law because they originate from Him, whether directly (Qur’an) or through His chosen messenger. This is a foundational principle: humans don’t have independent authority to declare something halal or haram — that right belongs to Allah alone. The Qur’an emphasizes this repeatedly, e.g., “Legislation is not but for Allah” (Surah Yusuf 12:40).

The Prophet ﷺ as conveyor of Shari’

The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ is included in this role by extension — not as an independent legislator, but as the one who conveys, explains, and implements divine legislation through his Sunnah. His rulings, judgments, and practice carry legislative weight because he acts under divine guidance and revelation (wahy), not personal opinion. The Qur’an states: “Nor does he speak from [his own] inclination. It is not but a revelation revealed” (Surah An-Najm 53:3-4).

Why this matters in usul al-fiqh

The concept of Ash-Shari’ is foundational to distinguishing:

• Hukm shar’i (a ruling that carries religious/legal weight) — because it traces back to Allah or His Messenger ﷺ
• From human legal reasoning (ijtihad, qiyas, ijma) — which scholars use to derive rulings from the sources, but this is understanding the law, not creating it

So when scholars debate a fiqh issue, they’re not legislating — they’re trying to correctly discover what Ash-Shari’ (Allah, through the Qur’an and Sunnah) has already legislated.

Q:

Are there any interest groups involved in formulating the shariah comparing the laws we formulate ?

A:

Good question — this gets at a fundamental distinction in Islamic legal theory that separates it from most contemporary man-made legal systems.

The core distinction: Source vs. Derivation

Shariah’s primary sources (Qur’an and Sunnah) are considered fixed revelation — not subject to negotiation, amendment, or influence by interest groups, since they trace back to Ash-Shari’ (Allah), not human deliberation. This is categorically different from legislative bodies (parliaments, congresses) where competing interest groups, lobbying, and political negotiation directly shape the text of the law itself.

Where human involvement does occur — Ijtihad and Fiqh

The application and derivation of rulings from those fixed sources is human scholarly work, and this is where several groups have historically played roles:

1. Individual mujtahids (jurists) — scholars qualified to derive rulings directly from the sources through ijtihad. Historically these were independent scholars, not appointed by rulers, precisely to reduce political influence.
2. Madhahib (legal schools) — Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’i, Hanbali, and others (including Shia schools like Ja’fari) developed distinct methodologies. Differences between them reflect genuine scholarly reasoning/methodology differences, not competing “interest groups” in the political sense — though geography, culture, and ruling dynasties did influence which school became dominant in a region.
3. Ijma (scholarly consensus) — historically meant broad agreement among qualified scholars of a given era, not a vote among stakeholders with competing interests.
4. Rulers and states — this is where real “interest group” dynamics have entered, historically and today. Rulers have at times sought fatwas favorable to their political interests (a phenomenon scholars call “fiqh of the palace” or being coerced/incentivized), and contemporary state-sponsored fatwa councils (e.g., in various Muslim-majority countries) are sometimes criticized for producing rulings aligned with government interests rather than pure scholarly reasoning.
5. Modern fiqh councils and bodies — organizations like the OIC’s Islamic Fiqh Academy, AAOIFI (for Islamic finance), or national fatwa councils bring together multiple scholars to address contemporary issues collectively — closer to a deliberative body, though ideally insulated from the kind of lobbying seen in secular legislatures.

The key theological safeguard

Classical usul al-fiqh built in methodological constraints specifically to guard against interest-driven distortion — a jurist must ground rulings in textual evidence and established methodology, not personal or political preference. Deviating from this to favor a ruler, sect, or faction is traditionally condemned as corruption of the scholarly function (sometimes labeled “fuqaha as-sultan” — scholars of the sultan/court, used pejoratively).

So the honest comparative answer: at the level of source, shariah is insulated from interest-group dynamics by design. At the level of human interpretation and implementation, political, social, and institutional pressures absolutely have and do influence outcomes — which is itself a subject of internal Islamic scholarly critique.

Q: We have example of alcohol ban in USA which could not be sustained . What lead to this reversal knowing the adverse effects on health, social , family, financial impacts? We have all the tools to enforce it and couldn’t not continue the ban. Do we know the factors which played the role in reversing it .. were they more beneficial than the harms?

A:

Prohibition (1920–1933) in the US is a well-documented case study in how a legal ban can fail despite public health rationale. Here are the main factors that drove repeal:

1. Organized crime and violence Prohibition didn’t eliminate demand — it just moved supply underground. Bootlegging created massive black markets, and criminal syndicates (Al Capone in Chicago being the most famous example) built empires on illegal alcohol, financing this through smuggling, speakeasies, and bribery. Gang violence over territory (turf wars, hijackings, murders) became a visible, widely publicized cost of the policy.

2. Enforcement failure and corruption The Volstead Act was chronically underfunded and understaffed relative to the scale of the black market. Police, judges, and politicians were widely bribed by bootleggers, which undermined public trust in law enforcement generally — not just around alcohol.

3. Loss of tax revenue, worsened by the Depression Alcohol had previously been a major source of federal tax revenue. When the Great Depression hit in 1929, the government badly needed new revenue streams, and legalizing/taxing alcohol was seen as a practical fix — this economic argument became one of the most powerful drivers of repeal.

4. Shifting public and political opinion Organizations like the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment (AAPA), which included business leaders, argued Prohibition had failed on its own terms. Public sentiment shifted as the social costs (crime, corruption) became more visible than the initial harms the law targeted.

5. Class, cultural, and regional tensions Prohibition was in part driven by rural, Protestant, nativist movements against urban immigrant communities (many Catholic and Jewish) for whom alcohol was part of religious and cultural practice. This created lasting resentment and non-compliance in cities, undermining the law’s legitimacy from the start.

6. Loopholes undermining consistency Medicinal alcohol (prescribed by doctors), sacramental wine for religious use, and industrial alcohol all remained legal, creating inconsistency and enforcement headaches, and additional avenues for abuse of the system.

Were the reasons for repeal “more beneficial than the harms”?

This is genuinely debated, and reasonable people land differently:

• Pro-repeal argument: Alcohol consumption did drop during Prohibition compared to pre-ban levels (estimates suggest 30-50% reduction), and some health indicators (cirrhosis deaths, public drunkenness arrests) improved initially. But these gains eroded over time as bootlegging expanded, and the social costs — organized crime, corruption, disrespect for law, unsafe/unregulated alcohol (some bootleg liquor was poisonous) — are argued by many historians to have outweighed the health benefits.
• Pro-prohibition (counterfactual) argument: Some point out that per-capita alcohol consumption took decades to return to pre-Prohibition levels after repeal, suggesting some lasting behavioral change did occur, and that the crime wave was a temporary transitional cost rather than an inherent flaw in banning alcohol per se — it reflected weak enforcement design more than the ban’s premise.

Most mainstream historical analysis leans toward: Prohibition’s design and enforcement were the core failure — not necessarily the underlying goal of reducing alcohol-related harm. The absence of broad social consensus, weak enforcement infrastructure, and the parallel economic crisis of the Depression made repeal politically inevitable, regardless of the ban’s actual health and social benefits.

Q: Is Islamic alcohol prohibition a “success”?

“We will switch the discussion towards alcohol ban in sharia/ Islam. Is it considered a success story ? No interest groups involved in formulating the prohibition, was almost abrupt ( some initial period can be considered as grace period) since 1400 yrs majority of adherents of faith follow the prohibition in closing the loopholes of it production and consumption. Some countries do implement though not 100 % successful. Not all Muslim majority countries have total ban. On individual levels o, it appears to be more successful as it is followed whether it’s freely available or not in majority of adherents leaving bad apples like situation aside. Do we have any statistics in these issues to share the reasons is success if it is considered a success. What factors played a role in it?”

The data supports your intuition, but with important nuance on where the success actually lives.

The statistics

Countries with strict enforcement — Iran, Kuwait, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Indonesia — reported annual alcohol consumption levels close to zero in 2022. Globally, roughly 45-50% of the adult population worldwide consumes alcohol, with many Asian and Muslim-majority countries showing markedly lower consumption due to cultural and religious factors. In the MENA region specifically, alcohol-attributable death and disease burden is a fraction of global norms — roughly 22,000 deaths and 1.1 million DALYs in 2019 across the entire region, tiny compared to alcohol’s ~3 million global annual deaths you’d expect from a comparably sized population elsewhere.

But it’s not monolithic — and this matters for your “success” framing

You’re right that not all Muslim-majority countries enforce a total ban: of 46 Muslim-majority countries, alcohol is fully legal in 22, ranging from Saudi Arabia recently expanding access to alcohol for some residents, to Iraq spending a decade implementing a ban now in place everywhere but Kurdish region, to Burkina Faso having no legal drinking age at all. And even where illegal, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Libya and Pakistan ban it legally, yet drinking is still commonplace underground, with Middle East/Africa alcohol consumption increasing 25% between 2005-2010 despite legal prohibition.

So where’s the “success” actually coming from?

This is the key analytical point, and I think it validates the distinction you’re drawing between legal enforcement and individual observance:

1. Legal ban ≠ the main driver. State prohibition (Saudi/Iran-style) shows mixed results — underground consumption persists, similar to Prohibition-era America, just at a smaller scale because of stronger social taboo layered on top.
2. Internalized belief is the real mechanism. The much stronger signal in the data is that even in countries where alcohol is legal (Turkey, Lebanon, Malaysia, Egypt), aggregate Muslim consumption still trends far below the general population — because the prohibition operates as a personally binding religious obligation (haram), not merely a law to route around. This is fundamentally different from Prohibition-era USA, where the ban was an external imposition on a population that had no prior religious consensus against alcohol.
3. What made internalization work, historically:
   • Source authority — the prohibition is attributed to Ash-Shari’ (Allah), not a legislature, so evasion carries theological/spiritual weight, not just legal risk
   • Gradual revelation (tadrij) — the Qur’an banned alcohol in stages over ~15 years (discouragement → prohibition during prayer → total ban in Surah Al-Ma’idah 5:90-91), similar in spirit to tobacco’s incremental approach rather than Prohibition’s abruptness — this is worth noting against your “abrupt” framing; classical scholarship treats this gradualism as deliberate pedagogy, not policy trial-and-error
   • No competing legitimate industry to co-opt — unlike US Prohibition, there was no pre-existing legal alcohol industry with capital, workers, and political lobbying power that lost its livelihood overnight and had incentive to fight back
   • Community/family reinforcement — the norm is enforced through social and family structures for 1400+ years, not just state apparatus, making it self-sustaining across generations even where enforcement is weak or absent
   • No safe halfway ground legitimized — unlike alcohol taxation-as-regulation in tobacco control, Islamic law doesn’t offer a “regulated legal consumption” middle path, removing the normalization pathway that gradually re-legitimized alcohol in the US

The honest caveat

Where it’s not uniformly successful — Gulf states still constitute an important growth market for major alcohol companies targeting expat/tourist populations, and underground consumption in “banned” countries shows law alone doesn’t eliminate demand any more than it did in the US. The success, where real, looks like it’s a belief-and-culture-driven outcome that predates and outlasts any given state’s legal enforcement — which is a different mechanism than what Prohibition or even tobacco control relied on (state regulation + market incentives). That’s arguably the more interesting finding: the “way” that worked here wasn’t enforcement machinery at all, but multi-generational internalized conviction — something neither Prohibition nor secular tobacco policy had available as a tool.

Q: Tobacco prohibition success story

“A parallel situation of tobacco use showed good successes. Both probably were entangled with interest groups , industrial, consumer aspects. Is it not true” where there is a will, there is a way”?

A:

It’s a compelling aphorism, but the tobacco/alcohol comparison actually complicates it rather than confirms it — because the “way” that worked for tobacco was fundamentally different from the “way” attempted with alcohol.

The critical difference: regulation vs. prohibition

Tobacco control never attempted an outright ban. Instead it used:

• Taxation — steadily raising prices to reduce consumption at the margin
• Information/science — the 1964 Surgeon General’s report and decades of public health messaging shifted the “common sense” understanding of risk
• Litigation — the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement exposed that tobacco companies had internally known about health risks and addictiveness for decades while publicly denying it, which devastated their credibility and interest-group influence
• Incremental restriction — advertising bans, indoor smoking bans, age limits, warning labels — applied gradually over 60+ years, not imposed overnight
• Substitution, not elimination — nicotine remained legal; people could still choose it, just with more friction and better information

Alcohol Prohibition, by contrast, was an immediate, total ban on production and sale — no gradual on-ramp, no tax-based deterrent, no substitution path. It removed the product entirely rather than making it progressively less attractive/accessible.

So does “will” explain the difference?

Partially, but “will” alone doesn’t distinguish them — Prohibition also had enormous organized “will” behind it (a constitutional amendment, no less). What actually differed was:

1. Strategy — tobacco control succeeded by not attempting full prohibition; it worked with the market rather than against it
2. Time horizon — tobacco control unfolded over generations; Prohibition expected total behavior change in over a decade against deep cultural/religious precedent
3. Interest-group outcome — tobacco’s interest groups were discredited through evidence (fraud exposure); alcohol’s illegal market simply created new, more violent interest groups (organized crime) that hadn’t existed before
4. Cultural entrenchment — alcohol had centuries of religious and social embedding (wine at Mass, cultural rituals) that tobacco never had, making a total ban far harder to sustain

The honest verdict on the aphorism

“Where there’s a will, there’s a way” holds up better as “where there’s a sustained, adaptive, evidence-based strategy, a way emerges” — but not as “sufficient willpower can sustain any absolute ban regardless of design.” Tobacco’s success is really a case study in substituting prohibition with disincentive-based regulation, not evidence that stronger enforcement of an outright ban would have saved Prohibition. If anything, it suggests that when a behavior has deep cultural or social entrenchment, an absolute ban is a fragile model — targeted, incremental, evidence-driven regulation tends to be the sustainable “way.”