226 Islam and Modernity
Elsewhere, and more dramatically, Thanawi argued that the nature of the
obligation to acquire profi ciency in religious learning (tabahhur fi -l-ulum) had
changed in his time.^7 This obligation had been what Muslim jurists call a fard
kifaya, a duty that some members of the Muslim community might perform
on behalf of the community as a whole, as contrasted with an obligation every
Muslim had to fulfi l individually ( fard ayn).
But now the conditions are such that [acquiring profi ciency in religious learn-
ing] has become an obligation for every single individual. For the protection of
religion is an obligation [on everyone] and this cannot be done without adequate
knowledge. People have, moreover, come to lack the propensity to follow
[others], which also necessitates that they acquire suffi cient knowledge of their
own.He continued, however, to emphasise the need to consort with the religious elite
(ahl Allah) as an equally binding individual obligation, for even the educated are
prone to lose their way (Thanawi n.d., vol. 2: 266–7).
Unmistakable in all this is the recognition that even the ulama’s learning
must take different forms, that there is more than one way of establishing –
albeit modestly – one’s scholarly credentials and, indeed, that those with a dif-
ferent intellectual formation might also acquire a modicum of such credentials.
Ultimately, Thanawi’s articulation of the ulama’s religious authority is much
stronger than anything in the discourses of, say, al-Qaradawi. But even Thanawi
not only recognises that the ulama are far from a homogeneous entity but seeks,
through changes in the curriculum, to sanction and perpetuate their internal dif-
ferentiation and that of the religious sphere in which they would operate.
‘New’ structures of authority
That the ulama’s efforts to assert their authority have been vigorous, multifac-
eted and – despite the magnitude of the challenges they have faced, and their
compromises – not unsuccessful should be evident from the foregoing discus-
sion. I conclude this chapter with yet another illustration of such efforts, for it
sheds some further light on how the ulama have fared in the modern world. This
concerns their initiatives towards the institutionalisation of their authority.
The European Council of Fatwa and Research (ECFR) and the International
Union for Muslim Scholars, in both of which al-Qaradawi has played a found-
ing role, are among the most recent examples of this institutionalisation.
Al-Qaradawi’s expansive defi nition of the ulama may well be seen not as an
indiscriminate opening-up of the ulama’s ranks but rather as a calculated effort
to foster alliances with like-minded religious intellectuals and to provide a shared
forum – as well as a new institutional identity – to them. On this view, the
‘ulama’ would be those who, irrespective of their formal educational credentials,