I am writing this article to advise the US Muslim community to not give credence to the “fatwa” issued by FCNA and AMJA. Darul Qasim’s Dar al-Iftā will issue a more detailed rebuttal from a fiqh perspective.
Acquiescence to a status quo is built upon defeatism and inertia. Over time, it breeds intellectual laziness, discourages creativity, and creates a lack of trust in disciplined scholarship.
When the printing press became a widespread technology and thousands of books were able to be printed at scale, some so-called intellectual Muslims went ahead and began printing copies of the Quran and distributing them everywhere in the name of glorifying technological progress for the sake of Islamic progress. The traditional scholars in Istanbul (the mullahs) advised people not to do that, not out of alienation against progress but simply out of Islamic loyalty to the preservation and textual integrity of the Quran, as the printing press back then was not yet ready for “prime time.” The mullahs were branded in society as backward and unwilling to use technology to further Islam’s interests. They were declared non-relevant and incapable of using ijtihād.
When the printed copies came into the market, almost every reader of the Quran found hundreds of mistakes in the printed copies and then told the mullahs to correct the mistakes of the said intellectuals. Ulema had to sit down and correct all mistakes by hand. It was a horribly painstaking process in which the said intellectuals could play no role as they did not know the words of the Quran. The Ulema saved the day for the ummah by not assuming they had prerogatives to employ a false sense of ijtihād where it did not belong. If progressive intellectuals actually listened to the traditional ulema, they would have saved the ummah from tremendous stress and embarrassment! There are ulema still alive in Egypt today who narrate this story from their own fathers!
A similar and more recent example is that of the Muslims who migrated to Britain in the 1960s and 1970s. They experienced much hardship, as they did not have halāl meat readily available. “Pragmatic” voices could have called for permitting reliance on meat from the People of the Book (Ahl al-Kitāb) under claims of necessity (ḍarūrah). However, British Hanafi scholars advised against this approach, telling British Muslims that they could not buy meat from the Ahl al-Kitāb despite the need at that time. So instead of shifting the goalposts of religious obligations through pseudo-legal exceptions, British Muslims invested in infrastructure, entrepreneurship, and collective organization. In a relatively short period of time, halal meat became widely available and even entered mainstream supermarkets and restaurants. This outcome did not result from lowering standards. It was the result of meeting them through principled creativity and self-reliance.
These historical precedents give us further reason to condemn a recent “fatwa” issued by the Fiqh Council of North America (FCNA) and the Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America (AMJA) allowing the use of zakat funds for political campaigns. Included therein is their implied critique of the many dissenting scholars who question their assumed juristic reasoning and its broader implications, implying that their lack of ijtihād fails to help Muslims progress in the USA.
The opinion expressed by these two groups represents a minuscule minority, and the overwhelming majority of Muslim scholars in the USA are vehemently against the idea. I am not going to discuss the flimsy and shoddy scholarship in the fatwa as that has already been articulated by several popular Muslim scholars in the USA. Additionally, Darul Qasim College will soon be publishing a scholarly rebuttal of their position.
What deserves emphasis here is a concern about methodology. Ijtihād requires immense dexterity in juristic nuances and principles. Superficial words of fiqh is not how an ‘ālim refers to ijtihād. The idea of allowing something based on ḍarūrah is something a high school student can use in his rudimentary essay. Scholars only turn to ḍarūrah if there is no other way to fulfill the command. I advise all Muslims reading the fatwa to not get caught in a web of deceit and to not acquiesce to an opinion which deserves no scholarly merit. Ask the hundreds of dissenting scholars why they object, and do not follow a very isolated view on this matter.
Muslims are already under great pressure by living in this country. Muslims don’t need further stimuli for trauma. A fatwa is supposed to bring ease and sukūn to Muslims and not make their lives difficult and complicated. Orientalists and others have already taken the meaning and interpretation of the Islamic text away from the Ummah. Now, super-rich politicians of the West—who by no means qualify to receive zakat—want to hijack our ʿibādah as well. What a tragedy and what an abomination in the name of ijtihād. The advocates of such a pitiful fatwa should be courageous enough to exhort Muslims to fight their own battles in Gaza and other parts of the world. They should not simply give up and cry about their fate in front of those who may have caused it! We need independence of and in our religion. We need our own strategies, planning, and organization. Allah helps those who help themselves!
