Shariʿa law was an ongoing act of discovering rather than receiving divine commands

Evidence

The Shariʿa, a hermeneutical, educational, jurisprudential, and cultural system, was a colossal project of building a moral-legal society whose foundational and structural impulse was summed up in the ever-continuing attempt to discover God’s moral desideratum, without God having provided anything except the faintest outlines of his moral law. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 162

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the interpretive nature of Shariʿa: God gave only faint outlines, so jurisprudence became a continuous project of discovery rather than codified reception — overturning the common assumption that Islamic law is a fixed revealed code.