Muslims have high hopes in Muftis for bridging the widnening gap between their contemporary lives, their needs and necessities on the one hand and what may be called absurd jurisprudence that Muslims are exposed to day and night on the other hand. Unfortunately, it does not guide them to the ease of Islamic Shariah or the mercy of the Holy Quran and Prophetic Sunnah but it rather exposes them to extremist opinions that were expressed in special circumstances that now have nothing to do with people’s real lives.
Unfortunately, advocates of such absurd jurisprudence managed to wipe out much of the role Fatwa institutions in our Arab world and even all Fiqh and legislation entities, particularly Al-Azhar Islamic Research Academy.
The success of absurd jurisprudence is not because of its rationality, ease or its ability to render people’s lives easier. However, this success is attributed to its ability to reach and communicate with people everywhere through their advocates. In addition, mosques were also used by them to communicate what people would like to hear. In my opinion, which is based on witnessing numerous realistic experiences, I believe that this is due to the existence of a fear barrier between the people of knowledge and Fatwa on the one hand and ijtihad and legal reasoning on the other hand.
It is really painful to say that our Muftis and scholars of the past century were more courageous than our scholars of today. The former group was brave enough to delve into issues that the needs of people required employing ijtihad and legal reasoning at that time.
We must acknowledge that we are facing a real crisis that Muslims, everywhere, pay its price as a result of fear of dealing with Shariah, that we describe as eternally compatible with every time and place, to provide responses that match new incidents in a particular age. One additional reason for this crisis we is the absence of the vision that is based on the objectives of Shariah (Maqasid al-Shariah). This absence inevitably blurs the vision based on ijtihad driving jurists away from issue they are searching for a proper legal solution to. Furthermore, this crisis is the result of ready-made fatwas circulated among various countries that disregard circumstances in a particular society, variant customs, traditions, cultures, languages and races.
