The European Council for Fatwa and Research and Yusuf al-Qaradawi

The European Council for Fatwa and Research (ECFR) was founded in London in 1997 upon the initiative of the Federation of Islamic Organizations in Europe (FIOE). While most of its members are Muslim scholars living in Europe, the Council includes a number of ‘ulama’based in the Muslim world, including Yusuf al-Qaradawi (see below) and Faysal Mawlawi, respectively chairman and vice-chairman of the ECFR. Based in Dublin, the ECFR meets once or twice a year to produce religious opinions, or fatwas, on issues relevant to Muslims living in the West. These fatwas, disseminated via the mass media, are accompanied by a more specialised reflection on what is called a Muslim jurisprudence of minorities (fiqh al-aqalliyyat or minority fiqh): an attempt to think of Islamic norms in contexts where Islam is disconnected from the State and the majority society. Advocates of fiqh al-aqalliyyat share both a commitment to the Islamic legal tradition (fiqh or shari ‘a) and a perception of minority status as a particular kind of problem for this tradition. However, the understandings of what the status of minority entails, and whether it is adequate at all when applied to citizens of liberal democracies, are issues which have been highly debated internally. Likewise, although fiqh remains the terrain in which solutions to the problems of Muslims in the West are sought, what this normative tradition precisely amounts to is sometimes unclear, given the simultaneous emphases placed on ‘reform’and ‘contextualisation’. In the case of the ECFR, given the complex nature of the collective deliberations within the fatwa body, one can speak of minority fiqh only as an.