"Throughout almost all of Islam's history, a single interpretation of shari'ah was never adopted and enforced over society as a codified system of law. In fact, unlike in its English rendition "Sharia Law" where we use shari'ah as an adjective describing the noun "law," in original Arabic shari'ah is simply a noun. The specific adoption of an interpretation of shari'ah as law by a ruler was not religiously mandatory, and it didn't happen in history. Unitary legal systems were a European idea, and worse, the desire to merge law with religious canons was a specifically Catholic pre-Reformation idea. This realization had profound implications for my beliefs. Rather than justice―legal consistency―being derived from Islamism, Islamism relied on Western concepts of justice to get off the ground. I buried my head in my hands as I slowly realized: we Islamists were the bastard children of colonialism."