111used theological reasoning to develop the idea of
dhimma into the modern context of citizenship.
The fatwa itself didn’t go into much detail, but a
lot of substantial work is being done in the back-
ground concerning many of these ideas. The whole
idea of obeying your covenants and being respon-
sible citizens within the British or the Eu ro pean
context rests on the research for that longer paper
of Dr. Hasan’s.
When Dr. Hasan refers in the fatwa to the Otto-
mans and the Mughals, he is invoking a well-
established doctrine to which all jurisprudential
schools of thought within Sunni and Shia Islam
agree, known as ijma’a, or the consensus of Mus-
lims. That all Muslim- majority socie ties have
joined the United Nations is an example of ijma’a.
It can be invoked to say that Muslims are bound by
the commitments they’ve made to the UN to res-
pect human rights and so forth.
I do think the fatwa has three very specifi c ben-
efi ts. One is something you’ve already mentioned,
and that’s the pragmatic recognition that a fatwa is
better than no fatwa, because other wise young
would-be recruits to the Islamic State would read
the silence of Islamic scholars as a form of con-
sent to the heinous crimes of that group. A fatwa
Bereitgestellt von | New York University Bobst Library Technical Services
Angemeldet