Portal: Islamic Law: Difference between revisions

A great part of the body of Islamic law regulates the particulars of ritual practices ranging everything from precisely how one should twiddle one's index finger during the daily prayers to how the the throats of cattle should be split and drained dry of blood during ritual sacrifice. Whereas scripture provides usually clear outlines on the basic workings of rituals, jurist differ endlessly in the details. The great majority of ritual law regards benign practices of the finger-twiddling variety which, despite being a potential and sometimes actual source of social discord, have generally become topics of lesser concern among the wider Muslim population. Ritual laws regarding the large-scale sacrifice of hundreds of millions of animals to Allah, on the other hand, have attracted growing international attention. Similarly troubling have been the pilgrimage rituals conducted at Mecca which, when practiced by millions of persons all at once, have repeatedly resulted in hundreds of deaths by stampede and contagion. While some of these challenges such as those with pilgrimage rituals, Islamic jurists contend, can be overcome through logistical and architectural innovation, other, often moral, challenges, such as those face by animal sacrifice in the face of growing concern for animal rights, have been cause for lesser optimism.