Shari'a
The Law: the signposted road of divine prescriptions, condition and husk of the inward path.
Shari’a originally denotes the beaten track to the watering-place, the road that leads to the spring. The Qur’an makes it the revealed Law: ‘We gave you a way (shir’a) and a direction’ (XLV, 18). It orders the acts: prayer, fasting, justice, morality. It is the visible husk of religion.
Sufism has never claimed to do without it. A formula attributed to the first masters sums up the relation of the three storeys: the shari’a is serving, the tariqa is journeying, the haqiqa is seeing. Without the Law, inner experience drifts towards pride or illusion; that is why the masters make conformity to the shari’a the first sign that a guide is authentic. Al-Junayd stated it as early as the 9th century: our path is bound to the Qur’an and the Sunna.
The distinction is not an opposition: on the difference between Sufism and Islam and the path’s rooting in the Law, the site devotes an article to Sufism at the heart of Islam.