August 31, 2010
Review – Towards a Fiqh for Minorities

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5 min read

Towards a Fiqh for Minorities by Taha Jabir Al-Alwani

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A short read, the author is a bit incoherent as to how a fiqh of minorities is to be achieved. With almost total disregard for traditional “appeal to authority” approach, he throws the baby out with the bath water in suggesting a solely Quranic derivation of Islam for practice amongst Muslim minorities in the west. Given the context in which this was written, it may be a reactionary stance to what the author first encountered when he came to the West, a society so much unlike Arab ones that many (even the scholarly) see no choice but compromise or reformulation of Islamic law. This author chooses the later, but obviously falls into the former by doing so. By taking the author’s suggestions to their logical ends, one will not merely compromise traditional “fiqh” (not a problem in and of itself) but will eventually compromise on several universals that are the mainstay of substantive Islamic law.

All in all this is a good read for the genre, but the genre is so lacking in works on this subject that a lot remains lacking.

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