Although in the West religion has been largely separated from law, in the Muslim world Islamic law, or sharia, is not con-fined to purely religious matters. Sharia is applied to a wide variety of ‘secular’ legal issues, ranging from inheritance, marriage, and divorce to contracts and criminal punishments. Moreover, after a brief (and mostly disastrous) flirtation with secularization in the 1950s and 1960s, many Muslim-majority countries have now embarked upon conscious efforts to inject more religion into government.