Fatwa

Jacky was twenty-three when she arrived in Egypt for a holiday with her boyfriend, Dave. Little did she know that an innocent holiday would result in a horror beyond her imagination. Separated from Dave in a bustling street, Jacky fell and twisted her ankle, only to be swept up by a handsome, chivalrous Egyptian called Omar. It was love at first sight. Jacky spent those ten days living with the family - sharing a bed with Omar's sister - irresistibly attracted to Omar. Swept away by her infatuation she married him and converted to Islam before returning to England to her parents. Returning to Cairo against her parents' advice but full of hopes and plans, Jacky's dream turned into a nightmare. As a blue-eyed blonde she was never going to fit in with life in a poor suburb where the women walked at all times with their heads bowed. During the next eight years she suffered non-stop physical and emotional abuse. She had to escape with her two little girls but how? This tense story never quite ends. Even now, Jacky is living in the shadow of a death threat. A fatwa is issued legitimately under Islamic law to a Muslim woman who leaves her husband. Jacky to protect herself and her daughters minute by minute, day by day, never quite sure what may be around the corner...

During the formative classical period of Islamic jurisprudence, wellknown scholars possessed not only the intellectual skills required for analytic reasoning, but also a broad general knowledge of the fi elds relevant to the cultural contexts in which they issued their edicts. A viable fatwa requires knowledge of the Shari‘ah as well as local customs, cultural realities, individual and communal implications, and related matters. The original juristic tradition was formulated and fi xed during the fi rst three Islamic centuries, a time of widespread sociopolitical turmoil. Of course, the jurists’ legal outlooks and thinking processes could not have escaped this reality. While Muslims of the prophetic and rāshidūn periods adhered closely to the authentic texts due to their sincerity, piety, prophetic training, and proximity to the revelation, the changing environment in which their descendants functioned gradually started to impact how the authentic texts were understood, interpreted, paraphrased, and implemented. Both the Muslim and the non-Muslim worlds have drastically changed since that time. The new geopolitical and scientifi c realities of our rapidly changing world demand a fresh look at some aspects of the established juristic tradition. The way forward involves a systematic fresh look at and reevaluation of the old fatwas, as well as the issuance of new ones with a maqāsidī outlook that can deal successfully with today’s ever-changing global realities. In this edited volume, papers on fatwa and iftā’ point to an approach that is both rooted in the Islamic legacy and committed to meeting the challenges of the modern world.

Just before dawn one winter's morning, a hijacked jetliner explodes above the English Channel. Through the falling debris, two figures, Gibreel Farishta, the biggest star in India, and Saladin Chamcha, an expatriate returning from his first visit to Bombay in fifteen years, plummet from the sky, washing up on the snow-covered sands of an English beach, and proceed through a series of metamorphoses, dreams, and revelations.

Draws on fieldwork and interviews with Muslims in places ranging from Lahore, Pakistan to Minneapolis, Minnesota to discuss contemporary opinions on the rise of fundamentalism in Islam and how it can be curbed.

Examines different persons, periods, places, and principles to weave a narrative about a practice that spawned a legal tradition.

""A gripping account of how we went from burning books to bombs on buses. The Rushdie Affair has shaped all our lives. This book shows us how."--Hanif Kureishi.

How Muftis Think offers a wealth of new materials from the nearly unexplored field of contemporary women-related fatwas in Europe. Lena Larsen’s interviews and readings provide fascinating insights into fatwa-giving as a contribution to developing a local European Islamic jurisprudence.

This book traces the history of the Dār al-Iftā, the Egyptian State Mufti's administration, from its inception in the 1890s to the present. Often uncomfortably positioned between a state bureaucracy and an emerging Muslim public concerned with the transmission of Islamic values, the various State Muftis have been striving to reinterpret Islamic law and demonstrate its relevance in the modern age. The history of the Dār al-Iftā thus provides a rare insight into major themes of 20th-century Islamic thinking. Four case studies demonstrate how fatwas can be used as sources for legal, social, intellectual and mentality history. Defining Islam for the Egyptian State will be of great interest to students of Islamic law and social and intellectual history of the modern Middle East.