The Question a Minority Jurisprudence Was Founded to Answer

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.