Islamic shari’ah originally meant revelation, now means divine law

Evidence

To speak of the Qur’an as a revelation that contains the law would correspond very well with the reality of the Islamic claim. At the same time, the two concepts are very close, and shari’ah, which originally meant ‘revelation’, is now the ordinary word for the divine law, one might almost say, ‘divine jurisprudence’; and even so it is roughly equivalent to the English ‘Divinity’ or ‘theology’ used to designate the subject of study. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1899

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the vault’s interest in how theological categories are linguistically constructed and then treated as self-evident — here shari’ah’s etymology shows ‘Islamic law’ itself is a shifting category. Also DEFINE on the term’s evolution.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1899