Muftis

Traduction, introduite et annotée, d'Ibn Taymiyya, « Kitāb al-Istiqāma », édition M. R. SĀLIM, t. I, p. 47-69, section (faṣl) dans laquelle l'auteur entend réfuter l'allégation de certains théologiens et autres que la théologie (kalām) est une science (‘ilm) alors que la jurisprudence (fiqh) relèverait tout au plus de l'opinion (ẓann).

This study looks at the history of two madrasas in Jerusalem, al-Madrasa al-ʿUthmaniyya and al-Madrasa al-Fanariyya from the 15th to the 18th centuries, in order to examine an understudied Ottoman institution: the imperial provincial madrasa. The imperial madrasas were assigned to the state-appointed Hanafi muftis of different localities across the empire. This essay argues that these learning institutions helped to consolidate the connection between the Ottoman dynasty, its appointed jurisconsults, and its broader imperial learned hierarchy. Beyond revealing some of its important institutional aspects, examining the imperial provincial madrasa casts light on the doctrinal role the Ottoman dynasty assumed in regulating the content of Hanafi jurisprudence that members of the imperial learned hierarchy were to apply. This role and the connections between the dynasty and its appointed jurisconsults had important effects within the diverse legal landscape of the empire, where multiple Sunni (especially Hanafi) legal and scholarly traditions coexisted. In further analyzing the identity of the endowers of these imperial madrasas, the article opens up new avenues for exploring how the Ottoman dynasty was defined in different contexts.

Ahmad Saiful Rijal bin Hassan discusses the mufti-mustafti approach in religious counselling. A mufti is someone qualified to give a legal opinion or fatwa whereas a mustafti is someone seeking a legal opinion (fatwa) from a mufti. The goal of a mufti-mustafti approach is to rehabilitate terrorists and extremists into embracing moderate views and to enable them to denounce their radical beliefs.

By the beginning of the 1980s, deliberations on Islam and biomedical ethics started to assume a systematised and collective form through combining contributions from Muslim religious scholars and (Muslim) biomedical scientists. The original idea was that biomedical scientists would inform and educate Muslim religious scholars about the scientific and biomedical aspects of specific bioethical issues. After being equipped with sufficient information about these technical aspects, religious scholars would embark upon their normative role by construing the religio-ethical Islamic standpoint. This proposed strict division between the tasks of biomedical scientists and those of religious scholars did not prove to be viable during the gatherings which hosted both groups. Instead of confining themselves to the informative role, biomedical scientists infringed upon the normative role which is typically assigned to Muslim religious scholars alone. Besides presenting technical information, they also presented their own perspectives on how Islamic scriptures should be employed in order to develop the Islamic religio-ethical standpoints. This article explains how biomedical scientists moved from being just “informants” for the religious scholars to becoming eventually “co-muftis”.


The Second Formation of Islamic Law is the first book to deal with the rise of an official school of law in the post-Mongol period. The author explores how the Ottoman dynasty shaped the structure and doctrine of a particular branch within the Hanafi school of law. In addition, the book examines the opposition of various jurists, mostly from the empire's Arab provinces, to this development. By looking at the emergence of the concept of an official school of law, the book seeks to call into question the grand narratives of Islamic legal history that tend to see the nineteenth century as the major rupture. Instead, an argument is formed that some of the supposedly nineteenth-century developments, such as the codification of Islamic law, are rooted in much earlier centuries. In so doing, the book offers a new periodization of Islamic legal history in the eastern Islamic lands.

A clarification concerning manuscript pagination in the book:
Since I started working on this project, I have used manuscripts and copies of manuscripts in different forms and formats. Most manuscripts I have used were digitized copies of manuscripts from the Süleymaniye Library in Istanbul. Since the basic unit  was a digital image of the open manuscript (capturing two pages) rather than a folio in the codex, I decided to use the page number that appears on the left hand-side page and the terms Recto and Verso to refer to the right and left page of the digital image, respectively. I use this pagination practice consistently throughout the book.

This contribution analyses the discursive strategies exercised by Russia’s state-appointed Islamic authorities. It draws on a linguistic corpus that consists of speeches and sermons by Mufti Ravil’ Gainutdin, the head of a major Muslim Spiritual Directorate in Moscow. A multi-levelled analysis shows that the mufti’s lexical and rhetorical choices correspond to the discourse of the Russian Orthodox Church elites. This affinity is a discursive strategy that allows Gainutdin to position himself as the authoritative leader of Russia’s Islamic community and to construct Islam as Russia’s ‘familiar’ and ‘traditional’ religion.

Muslim communities in Lebanon have developed radically new institutions of religious leadership since the advent of the confessional state. These leaderships were created or refined over the course of Lebanon's first five decades (1920s–1970s), often building on pre-existing institutional norms but shaped by common patterns of integration into a state-centric system of confessional representation. Such institutions have played a key role in representing and reinforcing the sectarianisation of Islam in the country. On the other hand, their proximity to the state has made them prominent advocates of peaceful coexistence and political participation. This paper shows (1) how three Islamic religious leaderships have become institutional expressions of a distinctive Lebanese sectarianism, and (2) how they have in the process become defenders of the nation-state. Focusing on the Sunni office of mufti, this leadership is surveyed alongside its Shi‘i and Druze counterparts to highlight their convergence on a single institutional model. These developments began in response to a French colonial demand for interlocutors with religious communities, and gained urgency as these interlocutors negotiated communal autonomy in religious affairs. The project of communal self-governance – which included jurisdiction over personal status law – called for centralized religious institutions that could manage nationwide bureaucracies. Thus a Sunni mufti, Shi‘i sheikh, and Druze sheikh al-‘aql were each elevated to leadership of new religious hierarchies. While competition among these three leaderships played a part in their development, this paper uses the history of the 1975–90 civil war to show how their common enculturation into the life of the state has generated a strong centripetal tendency in their political behavior.

This project looks at modern formations of sectarianism through the institutionalization of religious leadership in the Lebanese state.  The central argument is that the Lebanese state’s “recognition” of eighteen Islamic and Christian sects has led to the transformation of sectarian identity politics as represented by institutions of leadership.  These developments are traced to historical processes of communal self-definition in Lebanon’s multi-confessional public space, and to a new discourse of religion arising from colonial encounters.  Changing understandings of religion, religions and religious leadership have reconfigured the powers of indigenous institutions, creating a cross-confessional clerical elite based on a common model with roots in both Islamic and Christian traditions.  The dissertation looks in detail at the significance of this national clerical elite to our understanding of the Lebanese civil war (1975-90).  It analyzes the activities and discourse of Sunni mufti and Maronite patriarch on opposite sides of the war’s front-line, showing them as firmly grounded in a common language of the nation-state, engaged in a nationwide struggle between civil and uncivil ideologies.

RECENT LEGAL DEVELOPMENTS AND SUGGESTIONS ON THE PARTICIPATION OF MUFTIS AMONG THE REGISTRARS
Assoc. Prof. Özlem Tüzüner (Phd)
Abstract
Women can obtain legal rights based on marriage law only through official engagement or marriage contract. Extramarital union, only by having religious ceremony of marriage, causes the deprivation of family law rights. Including muftis among the registrars may reduce this deprivation. For the participation of muftis among the registrars, amendments were made in the Law on Civil Registration Services and the Marriage Regulation. The Presidency of Religious Affairs published the Circular on the Official Marriage Authority. The marriage carried out by the Mufti according to the mentioned circular refers to the simultaneous unification of the religious and official ceremonies. The mentioned simultaneous unification violates the hierarchy of norms, especially the fourth paragraph of article 174 of the Constitution and the second paragraph of article 143 of the Turkish Civil Code. According to the relevant circular, marriage ceremony begins and ends with the hadith and prayers required by Islam. The annexes of the Circular are written first in Arabic and then in Turkish. The Constitutional Court, unanimously, rejected the annulment request for the participation of muftis among the registrars. However, in the relevant circular, attention could be paid to the priority sequencing and chronological divergence of the religious and official ceremonies of marriage. In the United Kingdom, in the formalization of religious marriage, the terms of registered marriage, registered building and the authorized person are in the foreground, regardless of Christianity, Judaism or Islam distinction. In Republic of Turkey, The Sunni dimension of Islam has been deservedly satisfied with the participation of muftis among the registrars. In the project of the secularism and the freedom of belief, as Turkish family law expands the circle of officially recognized marriage ceremonies, when the appropriate conditions arise, not only other religions, but also the Alevi and Shia dimension of Islam can be taken into account. 
Keywords: Participation of muftis among the registrars, Circular on the Official Marriage Authority, fourth paragraph of article 174 of the Constitution, second paragraph of article 143 of the Turkish Civil Code, hierarchy of norms, registered building, freedom of belief