Iftā’ and Fatwa in the Muslim World and the West

In his review of Maha Elkaisy-Friemuth’s Gods and Humans in IslamicThought: Abdul-Jabbār, Ibn Sīna and al-Ghazāli (Abingdon: Routledge,2006), Sajjad Rizvi (2008) identifies three paths proposed by three influentialmedieval thinkers as characterizing the interconnected nature of intellectualinquiry in Islam: Abd al-Jabbar (d. 1025), regarded as representing the kalām tradition, Ibn Sina (d. 1037) of the philosophical orientation, and al-Ghazali(d. 1111) of the Sufi tradition. If Rizvi had accurately added the juridical orjurisprudential dimension to Elkaisy-Friemuth’s perspective, his review wouldhave panoramically captured the essence of Islam’s intellectual tradition. Theelegant book under review, Iftā and Fatwa in the Muslim World and the West,edited by Zulfiqar Ali Shah, has taken care of that major omission in whatmay be described as a virtually all-encompassing look at emerging concernsin iftā’ (formulating a fatwa) and fatwa (issuing a fatwa).The book features an introduction by the editor and eight chapters byscholars in the various foci of the subject covered. The introduction situatesthe book’s subject in a historical context and exposes its indebtedness tothe seminar convened during July 2011 by the International Institute of IslamicThought’s (IIIT) Summer Institute for Scholars, which addressed thistopic. The editor attributes the emergence of consensus on the chaotic natureof the contemporary processes of both iftā’ and fatwa to the seminar.He then identifies the intellectual skills required for analytical reasoning,as well as the broad general knowledge of the fields relevant to the culturalcontexts of their verdicts, as the strength that characterized the excellentperformance of scholars in fatwa formulation and issuance from the riseof the Abbasids in 750 to the fall of Andalusia in 1492. Conversely, contemporaryknowledge is fragmented into specializations and sub-specializations,all of which can hardly be mastered by one scholar or group ofscholars. The editor, who engages critically with various issues and concernsinvolved in the contemporary formulation and issuance of fatwa, alsoprovides a brief description of each chapter’s subject. However, the wordal-fiqh al-istidlālī (demonstrative fiqh) is wrongly rendered as fiqh alistighlālī(p. 10) ...