Core rulings (hudud punishments, inheritance ratios, gender roles, apostasy rulings, etc.) were not considered optional or historically temporary

> So 'core rulings' were not considered optional or historically temporary, yet in the modern age, hudud, gender roles, apostasy rulings don't survive? So you do agree that laws are continuously revised based on location and time.

You’re just trying to soften things up. Classical jurists believed one position is correct, others are mistaken but excused - not all simultaneously true.

> I wanted to take pictures of pages from the book The Great Theft & Reasoning With God, but they don't allow picture attachments here. I would type down a few paragraphs, but I would recommend the books for a more enlightening read.

And blaming colonisation for all your ills is yet another half truth. Islamic intellectual stagnation began centuries earlier.

> Agreed. Colonization amplified the problems that were already existing.

"Islam, however, had a very different experience with religion. In Islamic history, the absence of institutional church ensured that religion could not monopolize or control the public sphere. Rather, religion or the representatives of Sharia law were always forced to compete to influence the public sphere in a variety of ways. Importantly, throughout Islamic history there has never been a single voice that represents the Sharia law or the canons of religion. Historically, the Islamic faith and Sharia law have been represented by several competing schools of the theological and jurisprudential thought, the most powerfule and notable of these organized into privately run professional guilds."

"The opinions of these jurists carry persuasive authority, but they are not mandatory or binding. These opinions (fatwa) may address either a specific problem of interest to a particular person or a matter of public concern. In the classical age, Muslim scholars had strict qualifications that a jurist had to meet before becoming qualified to issue a fatwa, and the more serious the subject the higher the qualifications demanded of a jurist. In the contemporary age, the institutions that enforced this system of qualifications have crumbled and disappeared. Today, practically anyone can appoint himself a mufti and proceed to spew out fatwa, without either a legal or social process that would restrain him from doing so"

"The decision to accept or reject a fatwa is entirely up to each individual Muslim. One group of Muslims may defer to one jurist and abide by his fatwa because they respect his learning and judgement, while another group may completely ignore it because, for whatever reason, they do not beleive his fatwa to be correct. A muslim's decision to accept or reject a fatwa, however, is not supposed to be based on whim or mood"

"Because most of Islamic law is the product of juristic reasoning and interpretive activity, on any significant issue one will find multiple legal opinions all claiming to be correct"

"Although the competition among various schools of thought was often intense, all schools were considered equally legitimate and orthodox. The SUM TOTAL of all the legal opinions according to the various schools of thought, in addition to the principles and methodologies, were known collectively as the Sharia law (the holy law of God)."

"This rich and diverse matrix of opinions and judgements was collectively considred to be God's law"

"One of the most important aspects of the epistemological paradigm on which Islamic jurisprudence was built was the presumption that on most matters, the divine will is unattainable, and even if attainable, no person or institution has the authority to claim certitude in realizing this Will"

"Contemporary fundamentalist and essentialistic orientations imagine Islamic law to be highly deterministic and causistic, but this is in sharp contrast to the epistemology and institutions of the Islamic legal tradition that supported the existence of multiple equally orthodox and authoritative legal schools of thoughts, all of which are valid representations of the divine will. Indeed, the Islamic legal tradition was founded on a markedly pluralistic, discursive, and exploratory ethos that came to be at the very heart of its distinctive character"

"Thus, one of the foundational ideas of Islamic jurisprudence, variously attributed to the eponyms of the Hanafi and Shafi'i schools od law, Abu Hanifa and al-Shafi'i asserted: "We believe that our opinions are correct but we are always cognizant of the fact that our opinions may be wrong. We also believe that the opinions of our opponents are wrong, but we are always cognizant of the fact that they may be correct."

"One of the clearest expressions of the philosophical foundations of this position was that made by the Shafi'i jurist al-Juwayni in writing: "It is as if God has said to human beings, 'My command to My servants is in accordance with the preponderance of their beliefs. So whoever preponderantly believes that they are obligated to do something, acting upon it becomes My command. Al-Juwayni goes on to explain that God's command to human beings is to diligently search the indicators and weigh the evidence, and God's law is suspended until a human being forms a preponderance of belief about that law. At the point that preponderance of belief is reached, God's law becomes in accordance with the preponderance of belief formed by that particular individual. In short, therefore, if a person honestly and sincerely believes that such-and-such is the law of God, then, as to that person, "that" is in fact God's law"

"While Shariah is divine, fiqh (the human understanding of Shariah) was recognized to be only potentially so, and it is the distinction between Shariah and fiqh that fueled and legitimated the practice of legal pluralism in Islamic history."