Evolving Meaning of Fatwa Surveyed, Implications of Recent French Fatwa Viewed Commentary by Alexandre Caeiro: "Why a Fatwa in France?" Le Monde Monday, November 14, 2005
The Union of Islamic Organizations of France (UOIF) decreed Sunday 6 November a "fatwa on the unrest affecting France." How is this text and the increased visibility of the fatwa to be understood in a non-Muslim country. This kind of advisory religious opinion issued by a mufti can be considered one of the historical constants of Muslim societies. Based on the Koranic injunctions (IV, 126, and XVI, 43), the activity of muftis ensures the transmission and the renewal over time and via the faithful of the system of Islamic normativity (the sharia). At the interface between legal theory and practice, the question of the believer and the response of the mufti delineates the moral universe in a given Muslim society. The fatwa traditionally fullfils a dual function: as a legal tool, it is sought by the judge in order to decide in a dispute at law; as a social instrument, it contributes to the reproduction of society in a routine way on the fringes of the courts. This stability of the position of the mufti should not, however, prevent our examining more closely the evolutions and changes in his function, because the fatwa is a reflexive genre, and the Muslim theoreticians, moved by a sense of contemporaneity, have in the treatises of etiquette of the mufti pondered the changing relationship between fatwa and society. For classical authors like Al-Mawardi (974-1058), the mufti is not be confused with an educator: he must be succinct and avoid citing the arguments that underpin his reasoning. The fatwa in that case resembles an oracle, according to Weber's expression, and his authority resides in the fact that the mufti speaks in the name of God and via a recognized juridical school. When, in the 19th century, with colonization and secularization, new discursive and institutional spaces emerged in the Muslim world the fatwa was detached from its legal function. And it would be reinterpreted and reinvented by the reformist movement of Al-Salfiyah, the return to the faith of the ancestors. Instead of a detailed response to an individual, the reformists made the fatwa a means of spreading an idea. Through the use of the printing house -- which they had an "instrumentalist" and neutral conception of -- Muhammad Abduh (1849-1905) and Rashid Rida (1865-1935) used the genre to construct a Muslim moral subject in tune with his times. The fatwa then became -- thanks to the expansion of the readership -- a mass consumer product that was to attract a new type of subject: a rational individual who had to be persuaded. The mufti then became a teacher and ideologue: he explained, convinced, and mobilized. Modern states would quickly understand the stakes involved in the fatwa and institutionalize it. The recomposition of Islam in a minority and European context seemed to indicate a privatization of the genre. And while the transformation of a "lived Islam" into "constructed Islam," according to the formula of the sociologist Leila Babes, underpins young European Muslims' individual request for norms, the fatwa has not to date been involved in the construction of the secular society and has in no way influenced political life. But in France, the country par excellence of the separation of religion and politics, the public fatwa has found an unexpected terrain. Subverting the dominant conception of secularism, the public authorities have for two decades been effecting a semantic shift between "immigrant" and "Muslim." Against a backdrop of international terrorism, certainly, but also the crisis of French-style integration, political leaders have not hesitated to draw the debate back to the theological plane, holding forth time and again about "authentic" Islam, "peace," and "social cohesion." The distinction between good and bad Islam has thus emerged, and it permeates institutional discourses and practices in France. Mr. Sarkozy's media-covered meeting in December 2003 with Shaykh Tantawi of Cairo's Al-Azhar Grand Mosque was, from this standpoint, fraught with significance. The interior minister's satisfaction at the fatwa issued by the Sunni authority, albeit out of step with the sociology and the expectations of the Muslims in France, symbolized the need for religious backing -- including foreign backing -- for a Republic that is clearly ill at ease and symbolically incapable of setting the limits of religious freedom by itself. The Islam of France appears at the same time then to be a political project, whence the French Council for the Muslim Faith (CFCM); a cultural project, which favors the assimilation of immigrants; and a theological project, which is supposed to facilitate the "reform" of this religion. In this context the UOIF occupies an ambivalent place. Although suspected of Islamist affiliations and often accused of fundamentalism, its contextualized reading of the Islamic sources and its vision of a "civic Islam" falls logically within the French debate. They respond directly to the expectations of the society and reproduce the idea of a necessary aggiornamento as a prerequisite to the integration of the Muslims. The "preventive" fatwa of 6 November (forbidding Muslims from joining the riots) is doubtless a response to the insinuations of Islamist manipulation, and perhaps also to ministerial pressure. But it also chimes in with UOIF policy: it is coherent with its ambitions. The UOIF, a pioneer in sharia thinking about the status of Muslims in a non-Muslim land, is also a founder member of the European Council of Fatwa and Research. This Council, chaired by Yusuf al-Qaradawi, star preacher on the Al-Jazirah channel, uses the fatwa as a means of religious education and explicitly sets the "integration" of Islam in Europe as its goal. Consonant with this spirit, while the theological body of the UOIF, the Dar al-Fatwa, generally practises private consultations, this organization produced what is rather rare for its part a written fatwa in the form of a press communique intended for multiple audiences: the Muslims of France, religious authorities abroad, the different components of French society, and the public authorities. After such a document you could see large fracture lines appearing in France and Europe between different conceptions of Islam among Muslims. 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