Powerful Arab body behind Muslim regression, says Australian academic

The world’s most influential institution of Islamic jurisprudence is unifying global Muslims around a medieval law code, a leading academic in the US said this week.

Dr. Mark Durie, a theologian, human rights activist and pastor of an Anglican church, highlighted the role of the Islamic Fiqh Academy (IFA) in the perpetuation of repressive Islamic laws in the Muslim world.

‘We cannot ignore this’, Durie said in his lecture , ‘The Organization of the Islamic Conference: Fatwas on Freedom and Democracy,’at the Washington-based think tank, the Hudson Institute on Wednesday 19 January.

The Fiqh Academy in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia was established in 1981 and is funded and supported by the Saudi-dominated Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), which comprises 57 Islamic nations and other countries with large Muslim populations including Brazil.

Fiqh jurisprudence concerns the application of Sharia to questions not directly addressed in the Quran and the Sunnah.

The IFA’s goals were parallel to those of the OIC, including unifying the Ummah (the nation of Islam), Durie who has held visiting appointments at the universities of Leiden, MIT, UCLA and Stanford in the United States told an audience of academics and government policy wonks. 

IFA members intended to achieve unity he said.   ‘They intend to do this by conforming conduct to the norms of Islam at all levels . . . and applying Islam to contemporary problems,’ he said.

Durie said that Islam and Muslims were under pressure to respond to modern conditions, and to the tensions between the Sharia and the universal understanding of equality and freedom.

The IFA provided guidance on how to live in the modern world, but its rulings echoed the official religious position of global Islam, which remained unchanged, he added.

A key assumption that remained unchallenged was that the Sharia was the perfect, God-given and only valid universal framework for understanding human rights and responsibilities, he added.

As found in the OIC’s 1990 Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam, the Sharia  stood over and above rights.

Freedom of expression for instance was a protected right only within the context of Islamic restrictions. Expression must please Allah and could not be used to attack religion (Islam), he said.

The IFA’s role could not be taken lightly, Durie suggested, as it was an ‘authoritative, highly respected and mainstream voice’ in the Muslim world.

It was an extremely distinguished body which was not extremist or radical, he said. ‘Its members are the best of the best in Islamic jurisprudence.’   They included Mufti Mohammed Taqi Usmani, who was a Supreme Court judge for 20 years in Pakistan, and Sheikh Ali Gomaa, the Grand Mufti of Egypt.

Many IFA members were top level consultants to international banks and financial institutions.

Experts from 43 member states of the OIC were part of the IFA, which had been active since 1981. They had met 19 times in 19 sessions and run 15 symposiums.

Responding to a question on the sincerity and independence of opinions expressed by IFA members, Durie said that if they were asked to go against their conscience, they would refuse. 

But they would be sensitive to political implications and had a conservative bias in reinforcing traditional understandings.

‘They believe in their rulings,’ Durie said.

One of India’s top Islamic scholars, Dr. Asghar Ali Engineer, the chair of a Mumbai-based think-tank, Center for Study of Society and Secularism, agreed with Durie’s assessment.

‘The Ulama (scholars of Islamic law) do not want to re-think [on certain issues],’ he told Lapido Media on the phone from Mumbai.

Engineer, a reformist-writer and activist, said: ‘There are times they [the Ulama] bend as per the doctrine of zaroorat (necessity), but when it comes to certain issues, such as personal laws (laws relating to civil matters such as marriage, divorce and succession), and laws related to apostasy and freedom of expression and religion, they become rigid.’

The Ulama had not approved heart-transplant surgeries for Muslims, ‘but when common Muslims complained that many people were dying of heart diseases, they debated on it and finally allowed it.’

In matters like apostasy however, there was ‘no way’ they would bend.

‘There is freedom only within the framework of Islam’ he said. He added that India, too, had an Islamic Fiqh Academy, which was no different from the international IFA.