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got spared from Mongol invasion due to death of Ogedei Khan right before the invasion, later got more powerful and superseded all civilizations in rest of the world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.
