This chapter addresses how law or sharīca intersected with other social and cultural practices. Medieval Islamic societies are often thought to be unique in the extent to which elites took their social authority from sacred law, just as Islam is thought to be uniquely legalistic. On the surface, there is much to recommend this view. There is no doubt that the acyān learned the sciences of the sharīca partly to qualify themselves as exponents of sacred law. Moreover, the all-encompassing nature of the sharīca, which included matters of cult, ethics, and family relations in addition to criminal, commercial, and administrative law, meant that legal forms of authority and argumentation were applied to many areas of social life. Finally, the representative social type of the civilian elite is often thought to be the qāḍī or muftī, whose position and authority were derived largely from knowledge of the law. Secretaries too were advised to become learned in the law so they would not be dependent as the muqallad or follower of a legal scholar. There would thus seem to be little reason to reject the widespread characterization of Islamic societies as “nomocracies.”

However, there are at least two reasons to qualify this perception. First, the extent to which the acyān's cultivation of law distinguished Islamic societies from others is at least debatable. As Weber pointed out, in a number of agrarian societies in which elites competed for prebends they cast themselves as carriers and interpreters of sacred law.