The Amman Message Conference

Takfir is the act of declaring another Muslim to be an unbeliever. It is not merely an insult. Under classical rulings an apostate may lawfully be killed, so a declaration of unbelief is the doctrinal move that converts a disagreement between Muslims into a licence to shed blood, and it was being used for exactly that purpose by armed groups in the years around the turn of the century.

The Amman Message was issued in November 2004 and put to an international gathering of scholars in July 2005. Two hundred scholars from more than fifty countries took part, and what they produced has three parts. First, eight schools of Islamic law are named as valid: the four Sunni schools, together with the Jafari and Zaydi Shia schools, the Ibadi school and the Zahiri school. Second, whoever follows any of the eight is a Muslim, and declaring such a person an unbeliever is forbidden. Third, the conditions for issuing a fatwa are specified, so that a ruling from someone without the qualifications carries no weight.

The third point is the least quoted and does much of the work. Most of the takfir being issued was coming from people with no standing to issue anything, and setting out who may give a legal opinion attacks the practice at its source rather than at its conclusion.

The declaration also names Ashari theology, genuine Sufism and true Salafi thought as within Islam, which was a deliberate refusal to let the argument be conducted as one tendency against another.

Islam has no body that can do what an ecumenical council claims to do. There is no office with jurisdiction over all Muslims, no synod that can bind, and no mechanism for making a decision that is binding by virtue of who took it. Authority in Islamic law has always run through scholars individually, through the schools they belong to, and through ijma, the consensus of the community, which is recognised after the fact rather than declared in advance.

The Amman conference did not pretend otherwise. It produced a declaration, not a decree, and its force is the number, the range and the standing of the scholars who signed it. Endorsements were gathered afterwards from several hundred more scholars and from a number of international Islamic bodies, which is precisely how consensus has always been demonstrated in Islamic law: by accumulation and by the visible absence of qualified dissent.

Whether that amounts to ijma in the technical sense is the interesting question and it is one the process cannot settle from the inside. Supporters point to the breadth of the endorsement across Sunni and Shia authorities, which is unusual. The machinery to certify a consensus does not exist, so the claim remains a claim.

For an atlas that covers many traditions, this is a useful case. A body can be council-shaped, deliberate carefully, decide something serious and matter a great deal, without having the kind of authority a Christian council asserts. The absence of that authority is not a defect in it.