The Three Points of the Amman Message

The Amman Message began as a statement issued in Jordan in November 2004 on what Islam is and what actions represent it. What gave it legal weight came afterwards. Over the following months questions were put to senior authorities across the Muslim world, and their answers were assembled into three points which an international conference in Amman ratified in July 2005.

The first point lists the schools of law whose adherents are Muslims: the Hanafi, Maliki, Shafii and Hanbali schools; the Jafari and Zaydi schools; the Ibadi school; and the Zahiri school. It adds that whoever follows Ashari doctrine, or practises real Sufism, or follows true Salafi thought, is a Muslim. The list is the point. It is a mutual recognition among traditions that have spent centuries disputing each other's standing.

The second point follows from the first. It is not possible to declare as apostates any group of Muslims who believes in God, in the Prophet, in the pillars of the faith, and who respects the pillars of Islam and does not deny any necessarily known tenet of religion. Takfir between the recognised schools is closed.

The third point concerns competence. It states the subjective and objective preconditions for issuing a fatwa and forbids any person to issue one without the qualifications the schools themselves define, and without following their methodology. A ruling from an unqualified source is, in the words of the text, not a fatwa.

The third point is the one that gives the document its character as a legal instrument rather than a declaration of goodwill, because it addresses the machinery rather than the doctrine.

A fatwa is a non-binding legal opinion, issued by a qualified jurist in answer to a question. In classical practice the qualification was institutional: a mufti was trained in a school, held a recognised standing, and answered within a methodology his peers could examine. What changed in the twentieth century was distribution. Print, then broadcasting, then the internet made it possible for anyone to issue a ruling to a global audience without any of that apparatus, and for the audience to have no means of telling the difference.

The Amman ruling responds by putting the conditions back on the record, agreed across the schools, so that the question of whether a given pronouncement is a fatwa has an answer that does not depend on who is asked. It does not create an enforcement body and it could not: no institution has jurisdiction over Muslims as such. Its force is the standing of the scholars who signed, which is why the number of endorsements and the range of countries they came from are recited as part of the instrument.

Whether it has changed practice is a matter for observation rather than assertion. The atlas records what the instrument says and who adopted it, and does not measure its reach.