Suchergebnisse

The International Union of Muslim Scholars, headquartered in Qatar, is an organisation of Muslim jurists founded in 2004 by Yūsuf al-Qaraḍāwī and led today by Aḥmad al-Raysūnī. Despite its importance in the current religious-political discourse in the Muslim world and beyond, this organisation received little attention from scholars, and no study to date has been dedicated to examine its claims and practices of authority. The central thesis of this paper is that the jurists of IUMS are religious and political authorities who: 1. embrace a wide range of "umma" issues, which allow IUMS to appear as the "authentic" and "autonomous" "guardian" of Islam; 2. play a role in international relations (ranging from Chad to China) as "supporters" of particular political actions; 3. negotiate a new type of religious authority embodied by the scholar-activist who emerged as a reaction to the deep religious and political transformations in the Sunni world. To conduct this case study, I approached IUMS from the perspective of sociology of religion (with a focus on the problem of authority) and relied on qualitative methods of analysis (contextualisation, descriptive discourse analysis, in particular), inspecting the local context of IUMS in Qatar as well the global context of umma politics, and using Arabic sources available on its website.

Ṭāhā 'Abd al-Raḥmān is a Moroccan Islamic philosopher who has authored, so far, more than 25 books, and considered to be a leading intellectual in Morocco and one of the most important philosophers in the Arab world. Yet, he is unfamiliar to the Western scholarship of Islamic and Middle Eastern studies which can be inferred from the rare academic publications in European forums dedicated to this philosopher. Ṭāhā 'Abd al-Raḥmān offers a philosophical justification for Islamism and Islamic reformism, especially on ethical matters. He developed a particular interest in family ethics, criticizing the Western family ethics, and using his skills in dialectical argumentation to promote the authenticity of and superiority of Islamic values, knowledge, and communities; he could be considered al-Ghazzālī of his age.