How to stop Islamic extremism: Global Fiqh Council (GFC)

[kalu_miah]

This was posted before in another thread so this is a cross post.

I propose a project:

Global Fiqh Council (GFC)
(Fiqh means Islamic Jurisprudence)
Fiqh - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Headquarter must be in a high gdp Muslim country, I recommend either Turkey or Malaysia. It should be a research institution in an Islamic university. Every country and ethnic group of Muslims with at least 5 million population will get to send one Ulama from their community. So there will be approximately 320 Ulama representatives from around the world. Around 280 from Sunni communities and 40 from Shia communities.

The project should be funded by OIC.

It should have living quarters for all Ulama, library, class, conference centers etc. Qualified Ulama's will teach classes at the university, others will do teaching assistant job and research.

Their job will be to come up with a standardized one version of Sunni Islam, one version of Shia Islam and then make sure that these standardized versions do not have any conflict between them. There can be standardized sub-versions for individual Madhabs.

Once these standardized versions are finalized, then all previous versions will be considered null and void and made illegal if possible. New text books (in every language that has significant Muslim population), research books, position papers will be published by GFC.

Then it will become mandatory for all Mosques, Imams, Mullahs, Madrasa, Islamic teaching institutions etc. to follow these teaching materials in every OIC member countries. OIC will also have to make treaties or agreements with countries with significant minority Muslims such as India, Russia, EU, USA etc. to make these materials available to their institutions, which will go a long way towards preventing deviant ideas among their Muslim population.

My motivation for this proposal is the following:

- Islam and Muslims have been a world power since its beginning
- Mongol invasion was a major body blow and many say Islamic civilization never recovered from it
- West which luckily got spared from Mongol invasion due to death of Ogedei Khan right before the invasion, later got more powerful and superseded all civilizations in rest of the world
- decline of Islamic civilization and empires specially became acute in last 3 hundred years, with loss of Mughal Hindustan, which went under British and finally divided in partition, Ottoman fragmented in WW I and Iran also lost land such as Azerbaijan to Russia
- after the fall of Mughal, Deoband started in India, and after fall of Ottoman Salafi became powerful in Arabian peninsula and others started spreading ideas of political Islam such as Hassan Al Banna, Syed Qutb, Jamal Al din Afghani, Taqiuddin Nabhani, Abul Ala Moududi, OBL, Zwahiri, Awlaqi etc. Since 1979 Shia Islam had their own supremacist ideology developed in Qom.
- the thing to note about all of the above ideas/ideology is that these are product of fragmented societies without backing of any state power and hence are fundamentally devoid of legitimacy and are bound to be full of deviations
- Salafi is an exception as it is tied to a state, but its origin is from a rebellious area who never had to administer a large empire with this ideology. Its management of Saudi Arabia and allowing funds to spread to other parts of the world was detrimental to the Muslim world
- the recent Shia ideology developed in Qom since 1979 has so far badly mismanaged Iran and shia affairs by spreading these ideas among other Shia population. One effect of this has been constant conflict with Sunni Muslims in many parts of the world
- so due to lack of interest or understanding of how important it is to manage religious and ideological matters and manage them centrally in one place, amateurs have taken over in this area with their ad hoc efforts in many parts of the world with catastrophic results
- the solution I believe is pulling together a team from all corners of the Muslim world and then properly manage all religious matters centrally in one place and thus take it out from the hands of amateurs

If we can get this project going, I think we will be able to address some critical problems Muslims and Islam are facing, such as Shia-Sunni divide and conflict, terrorism and violence by rogue Islamic groups, groups like Taliban banning education for Girls without any basis in Islam and many others.

The GFC can be a seed for solution to the problem of fragmentation, conflict, chaos and become a vehicle to promote unity, tolerance and peaceful coexistence with people of different faith among 1.6 billion Muslims.

So is this going to work? If not please tell us why not and provide alternative ideas that may work.

 

[Skallagrim]

An important teaching of Quran is there's no intermediary between a man and God. Everyone will be held responsible for their own action. So some verdicts/rulings of a 'Global Fiqh Council' being not accepted to some Muslims, it may not be theoretically or theocratically right to declare them 'outside the fold of Islam'.

No state will take the risk of enforcing 'Global Islam' without a consensus of its mullahs/clerics (which is unlikely, if not impossible).

Quran puts much emphasis on individual discretion and responsibility. In my opinion, if the suicide guys, who think civilians can be a legitimate target or suicide attack is Islamically OK, learnt Islam by their own understanding of the Quran (an approach substantiated by several verses of Quran), instead of from the fatwahs of Sheikh this or that, they may not have taken this extremist route. In teaching Islam our academic institutions can emphasize on this approach.

 

[Kaniska]

@Kalu.....I really read all of your posts always...of course it is a different matter wheather i like it or not...Because your posts are always have some substance to it....

Now as a lay man....i have an impression that to become any sort of power...religious association will not be a strong factor...Because the time are changing and so does the mindset of the people and of course the nation...Germay and then UK was super power in last century...then came USA...and now China...You know why these nations are great powers?...Because they excel in knowledge, reserch, provide and scientific invention and societal equality in their people....As long as a core foundation of a scoiety is not changing...they can make so many associations but nothing will be successful...

See...you have OIC since decades.....Inspite of being the most powerful block in paper with holding the energy resource of the world....they can not be a power in this world.....But again within same Islamic nations...think about Turkey....Turkey is a star among the Muslim nations??? What is the reason...I donot need to explain...every one knows about it....

So the bottom line is that when societal improvement will not happen till that point no one can be a power block....

 

[Azazel]

This was posted before in another thread so this is a cross post.

I propose a project:

Global Fiqh Council (GFC)
(Fiqh means Islamic Jurisprudence)
Fiqh - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Headquarter must be in a high gdp Muslim country, I recommend either Turkey or Malaysia. It should be a research institution in an Islamic university. Every country and ethnic group of Muslims with at least 5 million population will get to send one Ulama from their community. So there will be approximately 320 Ulama representatives from around the world. Around 280 from Sunni communities and 40 from Shia communities.

The project should be funded by OIC.

It should have living quarters for all Ulama, library, class, conference centers etc. Qualified Ulama's will teach classes at the university, others will do teaching assistant job and research.

Their job will be to come up with a standardized one version of Sunni Islam, one version of Shia Islam and then make sure that these standardized versions do not have any conflict between them. There can be standardized sub-versions for individual Madhabs.

Once these standardized versions are finalized, then all previous versions will be considered null and void and made illegal if possible. New text books (in every language that has significant Muslim population), research books, position papers will be published by GFC.

Then it will become mandatory for all Mosques, Imams, Mullahs, Madrasa, Islamic teaching institutions etc. to follow these teaching materials in every OIC member countries. OIC will also have to make treaties or agreements with countries with significant minority Muslims such as India, Russia, EU, USA etc. to make these materials available to their institutions, which will go a long way towards preventing deviant ideas among their Muslim population.

My motivation for this proposal is the following:

- Islam and Muslims have been a world power since its beginning
- Mongol invasion was a major body blow and many say Islamic civilization never recovered from it
- West which luckily got spared from Mongol invasion due to death of Ogedei Khan right before the invasion, later got more powerful and superseded all civilizations in rest of the world
- decline of Islamic civilization and empires specially became acute in last 3 hundred years, with loss of Mughal Hindustan, which went under British and finally divided in partition, Ottoman fragmented in WW I and Iran also lost land such as Azerbaijan to Russia
- after the fall of Mughal, Deoband started in India, and after fall of Ottoman Salafi became powerful in Arabian peninsula and others started spreading ideas of political Islam such as Hassan Al Banna, Syed Qutb, Jamal Al din Afghani, Taqiuddin Nabhani, Abul Ala Moududi, OBL, Zwahiri, Awlaqi etc. Since 1979 Shia Islam had their own supremacist ideology developed in Qom.
- the thing to note about all of the above ideas/ideology is that these are product of fragmented societies without backing of any state power and hence are fundamentally devoid of legitimacy and are bound to be full of deviations
- Salafi is an exception as it is tied to a state, but its origin is from a rebellious area who never had to administer a large empire with this ideology. Its management of Saudi Arabia and allowing funds to spread to other parts of the world was detrimental to the Muslim world
- the recent Shia ideology developed in Qom since 1979 has so far badly mismanaged Iran and shia affairs by spreading these ideas among other Shia population. One effect of this has been constant conflict with Sunni Muslims in many parts of the world
- so due to lack of interest or understanding of how important it is to manage religious and ideological matters and manage them centrally in one place, amateurs have taken over in this area with their ad hoc efforts in many parts of the world with catastrophic results
- the solution I believe is pulling together a team from all corners of the Muslim world and then properly manage all religious matters centrally in one place and thus take it out from the hands of amateurs

If we can get this project going, I think we will be able to address some critical problems Muslims and Islam are facing, such as Shia-Sunni divide and conflict, terrorism and violence by rogue Islamic groups, groups like Taliban banning education for Girls without any basis in Islam and many others.

The GFC can be a seed for solution to the problem of fragmentation, conflict, chaos and become a vehicle to promote unity, tolerance and peaceful coexistence with people of different faith among 1.6 billion Muslims.

So is this going to work? If not please tell us why not and provide alternative ideas that may work.

Your first line itself poses problem.World most wealthiest and Influential Islamic country is Saudi Arabia.They have one of the highest (nominal and per capita)GDP and controls most holiest places of worship for Muslims.So inevitably these projects will be hijacked by Saudis.The HQ of OIC itself is in Saudi.This will never work the way you want.

 

[kalu_miah]

An important teaching of Quran is there's no intermediary between a man and God. Everyone will be held responsible for their own action. So some verdicts/rulings of a 'Global Fiqh Council' being not accepted to some Muslims, it may not be theoretically or theocratically right to declare them 'outside the fold of Islam'.

No state will take the risk of enforcing 'Global Islam' without a consensus of its mullahs/clerics (which is unlikely, if not impossible).

Quran puts much emphasis on individual discretion and responsibility. In my opinion, if the suicide guys, who think civilians can be a legitimate target or suicide attack is Islamically OK, learnt Islam by their own understanding of the Quran (an approach substantiated by several verses of Quran), instead of from the fatwahs of Sheikh this or that, they may not have taken this extremist route. In teaching Islam our academic institutions can emphasize on this approach.

There is no intermediary, but Fiqh is not about intermediary, but rather about expertise on Islamic law interpreted from not just Quran and Sunnah, but from studying the 1400 year long precedence of application of this law.

And about declaring people outside the fold of Islam, I think there is very strong inclination within fiiqh to avoid this route, as the judge can be only Allah (SWT) for such extreme decisions, except for very clear and egregious cases that are clearly defined in fiqh, which this GFC will not need to deal with. Local Ulama's in any country can reach this decision, for example Ahmadi's were declared outside the fold of Islam in both Pakistan and Bangladesh. GFC however can judge these decisions and provide their opinion on it.

This is not going to be one version of "Global Islam" but rather cleaning up, standardization and coordination of many different individual Madhabs, by collecting material, original sources and doing original research on them.

Every country and Muslim community already have such institutions, what I am proposing is a global effort to unify these research efforts, so a bridge is built to facilitate coordination among the Ulama communities in different countries from different parts of the globe.

When Muhammad (SAWS) was alive, there was only one Islam, now it has traveled to many lands, become syncretic and picked up bits and pieces from indigenous cultures. Over time they evolved into quite different things in different places, although the core remains the same. There was no good way to avoid this, as that is how religion transform in human societies with time and space.

As the world is becoming smaller, now we have the resources to bring people from different parts of the world and have debate in one place. We don't know the end result, but I think it will be worth it, because the potential benefits can far outweigh the resource spent on this effort.

 

[kalu_miah]

@Kalu.....I really read all of your posts always...of course it is a different matter wheather i like it or not...Because your posts are always have some substance to it....

Now as a lay man....i have an impression that to become any sort of power...religious association will not be a strong factor...Because the time are changing and so does the mindset of the people and of course the nation...Germay and then UK was super power in last century...then came USA...and now China...You know why these nations are great powers?...Because they excel in knowledge, reserch, provide and scientific invention and societal equality in their people....As long as a core foundation of a scoiety is not changing...they can make so many associations but nothing will be successful...

See...you have OIC since decades.....Inspite of being the most powerful block in paper with holding the energy resource of the world....they can not be a power in this world.....But again within same Islamic nations...think about Turkey....Turkey is a star among the Muslim nations??? What is the reason...I donot need to explain...every one knows about it....

So the bottom line is that when societal improvement will not happen till that point no one can be a power block....

Thanks for your kind words. You are one of the rare sane Indian posters, although like yourself I may not agree with all your views. Its perfectly natural to have different views, the whole point is to listen to the views of the other side and gain a greater understanding of different view points of people from different communities and countries.

I understand what you are trying to say and I agree with your point that the way to gain power and development is through science, technology and knowledge. There were other Indian posters also saying things like we need less religion not more.

OIC is not every effective, but it does have some track record. For example, it established an engineering univ. for students from OIC member countries in Bangladesh:
.::Islamic University of Technology

Now, with due respect, if I may point out, I started this thread to not discuss what will make Muslims countries economically powerful. If you will note I specifically chose a very narrow target, which is how to stop extremism. For that I blame a very fragmented set of belief system with little control over who can claim to become an expert and issue Fatwa, which is exactly what all these people did, many of whom had little or no background in Islamic history, theology or jurisprudence.

To change this state of affairs, what I am proposing is that Muslim communities of the world should choose some representative experts from themselves and send them to one place, so these matters can be debated and may be once they stay in one place long enough, some new unified school of thought will develop and people will automatically listen to those learned school of thought about their belief system, rather than to believe some ignorant self proclaimed expert who wants to use Islam and Muslims for their own ego trip or whatever strange ideas they may have developed during the course of their lifetime, which is not grounded on real knowledge and expertise. OBL, Zwahiri, Hassan al Banna, Qutb, Nabhani, Moududi etc. I believe are perfect examples of these kind of false experts who has created this Frankenstein monster of deviant ideology we have today, that is at the root of the problem of extremism.

 

[kalu_miah]

Your first line itself poses problem.World most wealthiest and Influential Islamic country is Saudi Arabia.They have one of the highest (nominal and per capita)GDP and controls most holiest places of worship for Muslims.So inevitably these projects will be hijacked by Saudis.The HQ of OIC itself is in Saudi.This will never work the way you want.

As long as Muslims are sleeping, it will not work, but if they wake up a little bit, the situation will change.

Saudi Arabia has a population of around 21 million with 10-15% Shia, which is exactly the same ratio for world wide Muslim population. 21 million is exactly 1.3% of world Muslim population of 1.6 billion.

This small population do not represent or decide for the 1.6 billion Muslim population of the world. If OIC fails to fund this kind of effort, then Muslims of other countries will take it upon themselves to fund such effort and make OIC irrelevant, at least on this issue.

But since a body like OIC exist, the project should try to get support from OIC. If it fails then other ways should be found.

 

[A1Kaid]

Cut off funding...

 

[jayron]

It is a noble thought. but How will you make the Muslims trust these organizations? It is not the medieval time where the king or a powerful pope can order people what to believe.

 

[kalu_miah]

It is a noble thought. but How will you make the Muslims trust these organizations? It is not the medieval time where the king or a powerful pope can order people what to believe.

It will be built up over time, as every Muslim community will send their best and the brightest to represent them in this elite council, under rotation every 4-5 years and this GFC council will have to prove with the soundness of their research work that they are worthy of trust. It will take decades to build up their reputation so people can trust them more than other alternate authority, but my professor used to say, anything worth anything takes time.

 

[somebozo]

Can be ban this GFC troll please. Sounds like another wanna be ummah leader desperate for attention!

 

[kalu_miah]

Can be ban this GFC troll please. Sounds like another wanna be ummah leader desperate for attention!

Why do you think I want to be a Ummah leader or anything like that? I am just sharing ideas, is that a crime? Or do you want shut people's mouth and promote censorship?

 

[Srinivas]

I donot think Religion has that influence of the medieval period in state matters.

 

[kumarkumar1867]

It really sounds like a ambitous mission & holds effectiveness if it can be brought into reality.

But problem is that though Islam was one in Prophet's time, today all countries from Saudi to Pakistan & Turkey to Bangladesh all form different version of islam.Forget other countries take any muslim country like Pakistan or Saudi, teachings & philosophy of the religious scholar within the country are not same. some are quiet modernized while some are still religious bigot. Selecting ULEMA will itself pose a issue & create sect within a country which will further lead to obedience or disobedience to law/rules of GFC. Also there are countries which will compete to hijack the GFC which includes developed countries like Turkey or progressive country like malaysia or monetarily dominant & religiously vital country in history like Saudi Arabia or militarily superior power like Nuclear powered Pakistan.

GFC is good idea but hardly suits these times.

Age old concepts like Khalifa & Khilafat are much more effective method for such intiative & are well supported by quranic texts. Muslim scholars should take initiative to add more effectiveness to Khilafat ideology & implement it for betterment of islamic world.

My personal views with my limited understanding. Peace.

 

[Wickerman]

Religion is open to interpretation. Even if you standardize religious teachings, how are you gonna reach 2 billion muslims? Especially the ones that are poor, uneducated etc? These are the people that mostly fall victim to extremism and get involved with the radicals.

You cannot stop religious extremism this way. Religious extremism can only be stopped when religion is given much less importance in people's lives than it is today. And for that, you need to improve literacy, improve living standards, inculcate liberal thought, REINTERPRET Islam as a more liberal religion AND PROMOTE it as such. But how many Muslims today will acknowledge such reinterpretations? For some of them their very moralities might be tied to conservative radical Islam. You cant change such people.

So the only way is for countries to improve living standards for their population to such an extent, that there would be too much to lose if people turn to religious extremism.