Concept of principles of islamic jurisprundence for minorities
Fiqh al-aqallīyāt (Arabic "فقه الأقليات" "jurisprudence of minorities, minority fiqh") is a concept of principles of Islamic jurisprudence that has been discussed since the late 1990s, particularly among Arabic-speaking Muslims. It aims to develop a new system of Islamic behavioral norms that offers solutions for the specific ethical and religious problems of Muslim minorities living in Western countries by drawing on "Ijtihad", i.e. finding norms through independent judgment. "Tāhā Jābir al-ʿAlwānī" (1935–2016), the founder and former chairman of the Fiqh Council of North America (FCNA), played a leading role in developing the concept. He coined the term and created one of the first program writings on "fiqh al-aqallīyāt" in 2000. According to "al-ʿAlwānī", the minority fiqh is intended to help "overcome the psychological and spiritual division experienced by Muslim minorities, especially in the West, by making them a partner in these societies in happiness and unhappiness."
In 1999, the concept was adopted by the European Council for Fatwa and Research (ECFR) under the leadership of "Yūsuf al-Qaradāwī". "Al-Qaradāwī" published his own book on minority fiqh in 2001, in which he argued that the minority status of Muslims living in Western countries necessitated certain normative relaxations that would otherwise be forbidden for Muslims. He described "integration without assimilation" as one of the goals of minority fiqh. Since that time, the concept has been the subject of transnational Islamic debate. Persistent criticism of the concept, particularly of the social and political implications of the underlying concept of minorities, led its original proponents to use the term fiqh al-aqallīyāt only rarely and to focus more on the question of how the modern concept of citizenship fits in with the Islamic system of norms and Islamic identity.
The path to Fiqh al-aqallīyāt.
Prehistory: Islamic scholars and muslim minorities.
Although "fiqh al-aqallīyāt" is a relatively new concept, Islamic legal scholars have dealt with the living situation of Muslims in non-Muslim majority societies before and produced fatwas for them. At the beginning of the 20th century, the Syro-Egyptian Sheikh "Rashīd Ridā" (1865–1935) produced numerous fatwas for Muslims living in a minority situation. They appeared in his well-known pan-Islamic journal al-Manār, which was published in Cairo between 1898 and 1935. Both thematically and in terms of their madhhab critics and utilitarian orientation, these fatwas are similar to today's "fiqh al-aqallīyāt." For example, similar to the later advocates of minority fiqh, "Ridā" held the view that Muslims are not obliged to emigrate to Islamic territory if they are able to practice their religion in non-Islamic territory.
Another scholar who dealt with Muslim minorities early on was "Yūsuf al-Qaradāwī". In the 1960s, he published his book "The Permitted and the Forbidden" in Islam on behalf of the Sheikh of Azhar, specifically for Muslims in Western countries. At the end of the 1970s, research on Muslim minorities was carried out at Arab universities, particularly at King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah. At the same time, the Muslim World League in Mecca and the World Assembly of Muslim Youth also began to deal with Muslim minorities.
Taha Jabir al-Alwani, an Iraqi scholar who had written a dissertation on Usūl al-fiqh at Azhar in 1973 and had been working at the Imam Mohammad Ibn Saud Islamic University since 1975, also began to deal with Muslim minorities in the West during this time. The reason for this was that his university was given the task of preparing Saudi students who were sent to study in the US for their stay there. When al-ʿAlwānī was invited to the US by the Muslim Students' Association in 1976, leading representatives of this organization suggested that he prepare a study on the teaching of norms for Muslim minorities. At the time, he actually wrote a text on "''Ibādāt" - the acts of worship -" but was unable to complete it for a long time.
Establishment of Fiqh bodies in western countries.
Similarly, from the 1970s onwards, Muslims living in the West began to make efforts themselves to find Sharia-compliant solutions to the everyday problems of Muslim minorities. According to "Zakī Badawī", he founded the United Kingdom Shari'ah Council, the London Islamic Shari'ah Council, with other imams in the UK for this purpose in 1978.
Moving to the United States in 1983, Tāhā al-ʿAlwānī began similar efforts in North America when he joined the staff of the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) in Herndon, Virginia, in 1984. In 1985, he began collecting questions that were on the minds of the Muslim community in the U.S. at the time, with the goal of submitting them to the newly formed International Islamic Fiqh Academy for answers. However, since the deliberations there were extremely slow, and al-ʿAlwānī found the answers he finally received to be very unsatisfactory because of their conservative orientation, he became convinced that it was necessary to develop a doctrine of norms for the Muslim minorities himself. In 1988, he was appointed chairman of the newly formed Fiqh Council of North America, whose mission, according to its bylaws, was "to develop a Fiqh for Muslims living in non-Islamic countries". During this time, Al-ʿAlwānī himself prepared a study on the acceptance of citizenship by Muslims in non-Muslim states.
From 1992, the french Union des organisations islamiques de France (UOIF, "Union of Islamic Organizations of France") and its affiliated Federation of Islamic Organizations in Europe (FIOE) held seminars on Islamic law. In 1997, the FIOE founded the European Council for Fatwa and Research (ECFR). The task of this Dublin-based body was to develop a doctrine of norms for Muslims living in Europe that would be up-to-date and take into account time, place, custom and living conditions. The committee was headed by Yūsuf al-Qaradāwī. During this time, he was already dealing a lot with the issues of Muslim minorities, for example in the program "The Sharia and Life" broadcast every Sunday evening on the Arabic television channel Al Jazeera Media Network and on the website IslamOnline, which he maintained and which dealt a lot with Muslim minorities in the West and East.
Emergence and spread of the idea of Fiqh al-aqallīyāt.
Al-ʿAlwānī was the first to use the term fiqh "al-aqallīyāt", however, in 1994, when the FCNA issued a fatwa under his leadership stating that American Muslims are allowed to actively participate in elections. In a discussion at IIIT that same year, he described "fiqh al-aqallīyāt" as a new name for what was formerly known in the Maliki school of jurisprudence as the "jurisprudence of incidents" ("fiqh an-nawāzil"), which dealt with the normative judgment of specific incidents.
Yusuf Talal DeLorenzo, the secretary of the Fiqh Council of North America, elaborated on the idea of continuity of f"iqh al-aqallīyāt" to "fiqh an-nawāzil" in an essay in 1998, stating: "Since the traditional fiqh of Islam is essentially the fiqh of the historical Muslim state and its Muslim majority, it pays no attention to the fiqh of Muslim minorities, except in the form of the nawāzil issued in various times of crisis, such as during the Mongol invasions, the Crusades or during the Morisco period of Andalusian history."
When the Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences (GSISS) was founded in Ashburn, Virginia, in 1996, al-ʿAlwānī ensured that minority fiqh was included as a compulsory subject in the curriculum. Nadia Mahmud Mustafa, an Egyptian professor of political science affiliated with IIIT, developed a course on the "Political Jurisprudence of Muslim Minorities" (al-fiqh as-siyāsī li-l-aqallīyāt al-muslima) for the United Arab Emirates University. Later, minority fiqh also became a subject at the private Islamic American University in Southfield, Michigan.
In 1997, the concept of "fiqh al-aqallīyāt" was already so widespread in Arab countries that the "al-Jazeera" television channel dedicated a separate episode of its popular program The Sharia and Life to it in November of that year. Yūsuf al-Qaradāwī, who was invited to this show as a guest as he usually is, was still skeptical of the term at the time and preferred the term fiqh al-ightirāb ("jurisprudence of life in a foreign land"). However, when he published the first fatwa collection of the ECFR in 1999, he no longer had any problems with this concept. In the preface to this collection, he used it to justify the existence of the ECFR as a separate fiqh body alongside the major Islamic fiqh academies such as the Islamic Research Academy in Cairo, the Fiqh Academy of the Organization of the Islamic Conference in Jeddah and the Fiqh Academy of the Muslim World League: the ECFR, he said, does not compete with these bodies, but only complements them in a special field of the doctrine of norms, namely fiqh al-aqallīyāt.
In the following years, the ECFR became one of the most important forums for the discussion and dissemination of the various concepts of minority fiqh. In 2004, after several books on minority fiqh had already been published, the ECFR acknowledged the legitimacy ("mašrūʿīya") of this concept in its journal and declared that it would use it as a methodological basis for normative ijtihād on both a theoretical and practical level.
The first elaborations of the concept.
Tūbūlyāk (1997) and ʿAbd al-Qādir (1997/1998).
Attempts to develop a doctrine of norms for Muslim minorities were also made in the 1990s in the form of academic qualification papers submitted to the Sharia faculties of universities in Morocco, Saudi Arabia and Lebanon. Their authors were students who came from Europe or had a special interest in Europe. In 1996, the Bosnian scholar Sulaimān Muhammad Tūbūlyāk defended a master's thesis entitled "The Political Rules for Muslim Minorities in Islamic Jurisprudence" ("al-Aḥkām as-siyāsīya li-l-aqalliyāt al-muslima fī l-fiqh al-islāmī") at the Faculty of Law at the University of Jordan. In it, he rejected the Malikite view that Muslims were obliged to emigrate from non-Islamic areas and advocated the view already held by Rashīd Ridā that Muslims should be allowed to continue living among unbelievers as long as they were allowed to practice their religion there. Tūbūlyāk's book was published in Amman and Beirut in 1997.
The book entitled "From the Jurisprudence of Muslim Minorities" ("Min fiqh al-aqallīyāt al-muslima") by the Lebanese scholar Chālid Muhammad ʿAbd al-Qādir (b. 1961), which was published in 1997 by the Qatari Ministry of Religion in the renowned series Kitāb al-Umma, had a similar orientation. It is the first book to include the term fiqh al-aqallīyāt in its title. ʿAbd al-Qādir is a former student of Yūsuf al-Qaradāwī and studied with him in Qatar. The book is an abridged version of the master's thesis that ʿAbd al-Qādir wrote in 1994 at the Imam al-Auzāʿī University in Beirut. In 2003, the Egyptian Ministry of Religion published an English translation of the short version of the text.
A long version of ʿAbd al-Qādir's dissertation was published in Lebanon in 1998 under the title "Jurisprudence of Muslim Minorities" ("Fiqh al-aqallīyāt al-muslima"). The book is divided into three chapters, the first of which describes international relations (pp. 18–187), the second the rules for acts of worship and mosques (pp. 189–363) and the third social relations (pp. 365–680). The individual chapters consist of a series of answers to questions of concern to Muslim minorities, such as the regulation of ritual prayer and financial transactions in the minority situation. The question of the purity of dogs and infidels, the combination of ritual prayers and marriage to a non-Muslim, and the question of fasting during extremely long day lengths in the polar regions are also addressed.
Tāhā Dschābir al-ʿAlwānī (1999/2000).
Although ʿAbd al-Qādir's book dealt with various individual issues related to the permanent residence of Muslims in non-Islamic countries, it did not deal with the concept of minority fiqh itself. This concept received its first theoretical elaboration in "al-ʿAlwānī's essay Madḫal ilā Fiqh al-aqallīyāt" ("Introduction to Minority Jurisprudence"), which was published in the winter of 1999/2000 in the journal "Islāmīyat al-maʿrifa" ("The Islamization of Knowledge"), published by the IIIT. The short text was subsequently republished several times in various modifications, for example in June 2000 in Egypt in a book series dedicated to "Islamic enlightenment" under the title "Fī fiqh al-aqallīyāt al-muslima" ("On the Fiqh of Muslim Minorities"). A year later, an abridged version was published on the Arabic website Islamonline.net under the title Naẓarāt taʾasīsīya fī fiqh al-aqallīyat ("Basic Reflections on the Fiqh of Minorities"). The Kuwaiti scholar ʿUjail Jāsim an-Nashamī, who is himself a member of the ECFR, dedicated a critical commentary to al-ʿAlwānī's program, which was published in the ECFR's journal in