European Council for Fatwa and Research

Classical Islamic jurisprudence was largely worked out in societies where Muslims were the majority and where the law of the land and the law of the schools were not in conflict about most ordinary things. Muslims settled permanently in Europe are in a different position, and the question that produces is not exotic: can a family take an interest-bearing mortgage in a country with no Islamic alternative, what happens when a woman converts and her husband does not, how are prayer and fasting times to be fixed at a latitude where the sun does not set in summer, and how is the beginning of the month to be established where nobody is sighting the moon.

The Council was founded in London in 1997 and is based in Dublin. It is a private body of some thirty-odd jurists, most resident in Europe, who meet in ordinary and extraordinary sessions to consider questions put to them and publish the resulting opinions. Its stated method is to read the classical schools of fiqh against European conditions rather than to apply any one school, drawing on the doctrines of necessity, of hardship and of public interest, and it is associated with the broader project usually called fiqh al-aqalliyyat, the jurisprudence of minorities, developed in the same years by scholars including Taha Jabir al-Alwani.

Nothing the Council issues binds anyone. A fatwa is a legal opinion given in answer to a question, not a judgment and not a decree, and Sunni Islam has no ordained hierarchy and no European Muslim electorate that could make one body the authority for the continent. Muslims in Europe belong to communities with roots in different countries, different schools and different scholarly networks, and many of them refer their questions to muftis elsewhere or to their own local imam. The Council competes for attention in that field rather than governing it.

Alexandre Caeiro has argued that the interesting thing about the project is precisely this: a body with no coercive power builds an audience by the act of publishing, and in doing so helps to constitute a European Muslim public that did not previously exist as such. On that reading the Council's significance is less in any individual ruling than in the establishment of a European address for the question.

Its rulings are debated rather than received. The most visible case is the calendar, where the Council has favoured astronomical calculation over local sighting for fixing Ramadan and the two Eids, a position with real practical benefit for a minority organising school and work leave, and one that a substantial body of scholarly opinion elsewhere does not accept. That the disagreement is public and unresolved is normal for the genre.