importance of water in an arid desert environment. Use in religious texts In the Quran, šarīʿah and its cognate širʿah occur once each, with the meaning "way" or "path". The word šarīʿah was widely used by Arabic-speaking Jews during the Middle Ages, being the most common translation for the word torah in the 10th-century Arabic translation of the Torah by Saʿadya Gaon. A similar use of the term can be found in Christian writers. The Arabic expression Sharīʿat Allāh (شريعة الله "God’s Law") is a common translation for תורת אלוהים (‘God’s Law’ in Hebrew) and νόμος τοῦ θεοῦ (‘God’s Law’ in Greek in the New Testament [Rom. 7: 22]). In Muslim literature, šarīʿah designates the laws or message of a prophet or God, in contrast to fiqh, which refers to a scholar's interpretation thereof. In older English-language law-related works in the late 19th/early 20th centuries, the word used for Sharia was sheri. It, along with the French variant chéri, was used during the time of the Ottoman Empire, and is from the Turkish şer’(i). Historical origins A similar legal concept Eye for an eye first recorded in the Code of Hammurabi. Qisas was a practice used as a resolution tool in inter-tribal conflicts in pre-Islamic Arab society. The basis of this resolution was that a member from the tribe to which the murderer belonged was handed over to the victim's family for execution, equivalent to the social status of the murdered person. The "condition of social equivalence" meant the execution of a member of the murderer's tribe who was equivalent to the murdered, in that the murdered person was male or female, slave or free, elite or commonone. For example, only one slave could be killed for a slave, and a woman for a woman. In other cases, compensatory payment (Diyya) could be paid to the family of the murdered person. On top of this pre-Islamic understanding added a debate about whether a Muslim can be executed for a non-Muslim during the Islamic period . The main verse for implementation in Islam is Al Baqara, 178 verse: "Believers! Retaliation is ordained for you regarding the people who were killed. Free versus free, captive versus captive, woman versus woman. Whoever is forgiven by the brother of the slain for a price, let him abide by the custom and pay the price well." According to the traditionalist (Atharī) Muslim view, the major