It is true that Islamic religious scholars explored God’s answers on questions that we would think of as falling in the category of public law. Nonetheless, many jurists believed that states were not necessarily obliged to follow their particular interpretations of God’s law, but needed only to ensure that their rules did not force officials or subjects to violate the unambiguous and generally accepted commands of God and that these state laws did not pursue policies that promoted ends that the religious law unequivocally declared to be evil. In practice, this left governments considerable leeway to act in a manner that the government determined to be in the public interest. When examining state practice, one would need to disentangle the degree to which states acted because they felt that they were compelled by God’s command to act in a certain way and the degree to which they instead acted in a particular way because they felt constrained by practical considerations of public welfare. For the doctrine of siyasa shar’iyya, which declared that governments had discretion within a sphere bounded by a few absolute religious commands and a few general principles, [Clark B. Lombardi, J.D. (1998), State Law as Islamic Law in Modern Egypt]
