Use of the term “Sharia Law”

I understand that Sharia is the religious law of Islam. Is the term “Sharia Law” redundant? I hear and read it all the time.

Solution 1:

Yes, it's a pleonasm.

Some pleonasms are considered irritating or clumsy by some people, "cacophony of sound", "ATM machine".

Some are idiomatic, "safe haven".

Some are idiomatic in some dialects, such as "I'm after writing down an example of Hiberno-English" in Hiberno-English.

And some are the result of borrowings from other languages. Place names are common examples ("Walla Walla River" means "river river" and "Bredon Hill" means "hill hill hill"), and "Sharia Law" would be another example. As such, it's probably best to use it when you want to be understood by an averagely informed audience.

Solution 2:

I understand the reasoning of those who say that this is redundant, like "ATM machine". But I don't think it really is. "Sharia" is being used as an adjective to describe a type of law.

Like: In my part of the U.S. there is a chain of grocery stores called "Kroger's". To the best of my knowlege, the only business they operate is grocery stores. So is it redundant to say, "I went to Kroger's grocery store"? You could argue that, "I went to Kroger's" is sufficient, as Kroger's identifies a kind of grocery store -- it can't be anything else.

But the reader doesn't necessarily know who or what Kroger is. To someone from another country, "Kroger's" might be any kind of store, or a zoo, or my friend Bob Kroger's house, or many other possibilities. Depending on the context, the reader may not even realize that it's a place. (I once read that the best selling postcard of all time was one showing a young couple sitting on a park bench, and the caption reads: "He: Do you like Kipling? She: I don't know, you naughty boy. I've never kipled." If he had asked, "Do you like Kipling's books?" there would have been no ambiguity. And no joke.)

I don't think it's redundant to supply additional information to identify something that may be unfamiliar to the reader. I can think of many examples where we do this. If I write, "Sally, Fred's wife, drives a blue car", you could say that it's redundant to give both her name and to identify her as "Fred's wife", either of these things by itself would identify who I am talking about, unless Fred has more than one wife or there is more than one Sally to whom I might be referring. But even if neither of those things is true, the reader may not know that Fred and Sally are married, or they may know that Fred is married but not know the name of his wife, etc.

If you want to carry it to an extreme, almost every statement is redundant if you assume that the reader already knows everything that you have to say.

Solution 3:

Sharia is indeed law. But not everyone knows that, so "Sharia Law" is a hint for those.