For law to exercise true authority and function as a sovereign source of obligation, it must maintain independence from competing normative frameworks. Conditioning legal validity upon the normative reality of Sharia or any other normative system precipitates a “crisis of disproportionate authority.” Such a condition inevitably leads to either the erosion of both legal and religious authority or the reduction of law to a mere instrument for enforcing a specific interpretation of Sharia. However, the impossibility of maintaining simultaneous, proportionate authority for both law and Sharia does not necessitate the exclusion of Sharia from the legislative process. As a product of social facts, law possesses a non-contingent existence. Consequently, Sharia may inform the lawmaking process, provided it is treated not as a normative criterion of legal validity,
but as a social reality manifested through the beliefs and practices of the citizenry.
By distinguishing between Sharia as a normative reality and Sharia as a social reality, this article examines the theory of Mohammad Hossein Na’ini as a quintessential example of the intellectual efforts of religious constitutionalists. The study demonstrates why attempts to establish proportionality between the authority of law and Sharia both during the Constitutional era and in subsequent periods are fundamentally destined to fail. Finally, the article argues that only by recognizing Sharia as a social reality can the authority of law be preserved, thereby enabling just governance within a pluralistic society while upholding individual rights and freedoms.