Fiqh al-aqallīyāt

[7] 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.

[10] 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.

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.

[24] 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.

[27] 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.

[28] 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.

[29] 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.

Here, Al-Qarādāwī addresses individual issues and problems faced by Muslims in non-Muslim societies and shows how solutions can be developed in accordance with the methodological guidelines he mentioned earlier.

The fatwas are divided into four subject areas (1. principles of faith and acts of worship, 2. family law, 3. food and drink, 4. dealing with the non-Muslim environment) and vary greatly in length.

However, these translations do not include the first part of the book, in which al-Qaradāwī outlines his theoretical understanding of the Fiqh-al-aqallīyāt concept, because the publishers felt that this was too technical and would therefore not meet with much interest among readers.

In a second study published in the ECFR journal in 2004, an-Najjār further elaborated on the legal-theoretical concept of the results of action, which goes back to the 14th century Andalusian scholar Abū Ishāq ash-Shātibī, and its significance for minority fiqh.

[56] According to al-Qaradawī, the minority fiqh is intended to enable the Muslim community to carry out the task of proclaiming the "global message of Islam" (risālat al-islām al-ʿālamīya) to those with whom they live in order to have a good conversation with them, as required by Sura 16:25.

"[71] According to al-ʿAlwānī, the following two Qur'anic verses should form the golden rule for Muslims' relationships with people of other faiths: "God does not forbid you to be kind to those who did not fight you because of religion and did not drive you out of your homes, and to treat them justly.

[72] Al-ʿAlwānī sees today's Muslims who have sought refuge in Western countries in a similar situation to the first followers of Muhammad in Mecca, who emigrated to Abyssinia to escape persecution by the Quraysh.

[75] Al-ʿAlwānī emphasizes that the participation of Muslim minorities in the political life of the country in which they reside is not a bad state of affairs that must be legitimized after a concession, but rather the exercise of a positive duty and civilizing activity.

[89] According to al-ʿAlwānī, the problems faced by Muslim minorities go far beyond the traditional issues on an individual level, such as permitted food, halāl meat, determining the beginning of the month and marriage to a non-Muslim.

[110] As soon as one performs the operation of "combining the two readings", one finds that the three highest values to which the two books, namely the written (= the Qur'an) and the created (= nature), point are tawhid, purification (tazkīya) and civilization (ʿumrān).

These were the original values of Islam before jurists influenced by Greek logic and philosophy came along and said that this or that was wāǧib or farḍ ('obligatory'), mandūb or mustaḥabb ('desirable') or harām or maḥẓūr ('forbidden'),[112] i.e. before the categories for judging human actions were introduced.

Al-Qaradāwī derives this principle from various Qur'anic verses (including Sura 2:185, 4:28) as well as from the tradition according to which Muhammad asked his companions to make things easier and not more difficult (yassirū wa-lā tuʿassirū).

Secondly, al-Barāzī and ʿAbd al-Ghaffār argued that in this case the council had improperly applied the principle of need becoming compulsion, because the financial weakness of Muslims in Europe was not the result of avoiding interest-bearing loans, but of their disunity.

Relevant studies by six members of the ECFR were discussed: Yūsuf al-Qaradāwī, ʿAbdallāh ibn Baiya, Tāhā Jābir al-ʿAlwānī, ʿAbd al-Majīd an-Najjār, al-ʿArabī al-Bishrī and Salāh ad-Dīn Sultān.

[201] The British convert Charles Le Gai Eaton called for the creation of a new minority fiqh that would be much simpler than what had previously been considered, because otherwise Muslim youth in the West would turn away from Islam.

[202] In 2004, Asif Khan (born 1977), a high-ranking member of the Islamist organization Hizb ut-Tahrir in Great Britain, also published a treatise on the Internet in which he rejected the minority fiqh as an attempt to infiltrate Islam.

[205] Asif Khan took particular offense at the fact that the proponents of fiqh al-aqallīyāt consider it permissible for a woman who converts to Islam to remain married to her non-Muslim husband.

In an interview he gave to a representative of the Jamestown Foundation at the end of July 2005, he suggested creating treatment centers in Britain for young Muslim extremists to teach them about the Sīra of Muhammad, minority fiqh and the role of the West in the development of human civilization.

In August 2007, for example, the Shādhilīya sheikh Nuh Ha Mim Keller stated at the annual gathering of his followers in the United Kingdom that minority fiqh was incompatible with the principle of taqwā, a form of godliness that is primarily cultivated in Sufism.

[229] Al-Qaradāwī himself published a book in 2010 on "Homeland and Citizenship in the Light of the Foundations of Faith and the Purposes of Sharia" (al-Waṭan wa-l-Muwāṭana fī ḍauʾ al-uṣūl al-ʿaqadīya wa-l-maqāṣid aš-šarʿīyya), in which he no longer spoke of the minority fiqh.

[231] Two other scholars, Mohanad Mustafa and Ayman K. Agbaria, on the other hand, have questioned the suitability of this concept for the Palestinian-Israeli context, firstly because of the political situation prevailing in Israel and secondly because of the indigenous nature of the Palestinian Arab minority.

In her view, fiqh al-aqallīyāt is "one of the most effective goods invented by the ʿUlamā' to [...] regain their authority in the highly competitive religious market of Islam, especially in Muslim minority societies".

[238] Since 2007, the minority fiqh has been the subject of a number of qualification papers at universities in Europe (in addition to Caeiro 2011, Remien 2007, Schlabach 2009, Albrecht 2010, Rafeek 2012), North America (Dogan 2015) and Japan (Matsuyama 2010).