Countering radical .. Fatwas Shawki Allam – The grand mufti of Egypt

Countering radical Fatwas
Shawki Allam
The grand mufti of Egypt
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The process of issuing fatwas – the primary role of the Dar al-Ifta – is integral to the process of countering radical fatwas and providing pragmatic guidance to everyday Muslims.
Muslims in our contemporary time are faced with ever-changing circumstances and subjected to precedents which were not tackled by earlier scholars. That being said, Muslim scholars in our modern times are faced with the challenge of rising up to the duty of holding tight to the spirit of the scripture and at the same time be aware of the surrounding reality with its fast paced changes.
In effect, fatwas and muftis represent the bridge between the long-standing intellectual-legal tradition of Islam and the contemporary world. They are the link between the past and the present, the absolute and the contingent, the theoretical and the practical.
Unfortunately, many in the western world have come to identify the fatwa with some unfortunate pronouncement of political or self-appointed religious leaders. But fatwa –giving is in fact one of the most important institution for properly understanding the relationship between Islam and the modern world. In an attempt to provide Muslims with authoritative guidance about their religion, muftis look not only to the vast legal tradition, but must also conduct a proper examination of the lived reality of muslims.
When each and every persons unqualified opinion is considered a fatwa, we lose a crucial to in our capacity to region in extremism and preserve balanced understandings of Islam. We may point to any number of declarations posing as fatwas from extremists and terrorist as examples of how grave the consequences are, of not following the historical Islamic example of differentiating between those with scholarly standing and authority and those without.
In recent years, unqualified and illegitimate personalities have exploited technological means to proclaim themselves Islamic scholars and leaders, and have issued opinions to justify everything from attacking churches, exercising violence, and denigrating women. True Islamic scholarship and leadership stands firmly against such explorative positions, which are merely politics in the guise of religion.
This Eccentric attitude has led to opening the door before baseless extremist interpretations of Islam. Needless to say, none of these extremists have studied Islam in an acknowledge institution of Islamic learning. Rather, they are the product of troubled environments and have subscribed to distorted and misguided interpretations of Islam. Their aim is to achieve purely political gains that have no religious foundation. They only seek to wreak havoc and spread chaos in the world.
In their approach, extremists depend on the apparent meanings of the primary texts without genuinely understanding them, ignoring the rules of legal extrapolation, scholarly opinions or compiling legal evidences. They ignore the objectives and purposes of the Sahri’ah for which the rulings have been legislated and which achieve interests and ward off harms in this world and in the hereafter. This results in producing ideological extremism and deviation from the straight path that inevitably leads to extremist behavior.
Thus, it has been incumbent on Egypt’s Dar al-Iftaa to rise up to this global threat and to wage an intellectual war and to engage in an ideological battle against the ill beliefs and warped understanding along with the sickening interpretations of scriptural texts which are being largely twisted and highly distorted due to the abrupt decontexualization of the revealed Quranic verses and prophetic traditions.
The responsibility of deconstructing the intellectual flaws of terrorists taken upon by Dar al-Iftaa has taken many forms; some are electronic and others are in forms of published books and articles along with attending many international conferences to combat the deviant ideological flaws of extremists