Ismail Kamdar – What is a Fatwa
AI: Summary ©
The concept of a fatwa is not the Sharia's law, but rather a man's opinion. It is defined as the ability to obtain authority and use a fatwa to justify actions. It is important to respect theemail of legal experts and not allow anyone to say their opinion. The importance of fatwa's authority and the bleeding of the bleeding of the bleeding of the bleeding of the bleeding of the bleeding of the bleeding of the bleeding of the bleeding of the bleeding of the bleeding of the bleeding of the bleeding of the bleeding of the bleeding of the bleeding of the bleeding of the bleeding of the bleeding of the bleeding of the bleeding of the bleeding of the bleeding of the bleeding of the bleeding of the bleeding of the bleeding of the bleeding of the bleeding of the bleeding of the bleeding of the bleeding of the bleeding of the bleeding of the bleeding of the bleeding of the bleeding of the bleeding of the bleeding of the bleeding of the bleeding of the bleeding of the bleeding of the bleeding of the bleeding ofAI: Transcript ©
Continuing on our series
of
aspects of the Sharia that are misunderstood.
Today, inshallah,
we're going to look at something that
we we still
have to deal with all the time,
yet we tend to misunderstand greatly.
And that is the concept of a fatwa.
Right? The concept of a fatwa.
Fatwa is something we seek out every day.
It's something that's
part of
the daily life of a Muslim.
And how many of us have taken the
time to actually sit and think what is
a potwa?
You know, what what exact role does he
play in the Sharia? How does it function?
Of course, the way a patois works in
a world without the hillaput is different than
how we would have worked in the hillaput.
But,
there are some
primary aspects of what is the fatwa that
we all need to,
be familiar with.
Do you understand with an example?
Right?
Say somebody invents something new.
Somebody invents something new
and
Muslims arguing
over whether this new invention is halal or
haram as we like to do.
Right? And the argument gets very heated
and someone goes to a local Mufti
and asks him his opinion,
or he didn't ask him his opinion, he
asked him, is this thing halal or haram?
And the Mufti looks at it,
and he says it's haram. Right?
And that's now the fatwa.
Because the fatwa that this new thing is
haram.
A few weeks go by, maybe a few
months go by, maybe even a few years
go by,
and a different mufti comes about.
And that mufti says,
in my opinion it's halal.
What happens in the community?
What happens in the community is the scandal.
People say, oh, this new Mufti is changing
the Sharia.
He's changing Allah's law.
Right?
But hold on.
A fatwa
is not the Sharia.
A fatwa
is not Allah's law.
This is the primary
misconception
that exists in the minds of Muslims
about what is a fatwa.
Many of us when we ask a Mufti
or a Modana or a Sheikh for a
fatwa, we assume that whatever they say
is the Quran, or it is the hadith,
or it is the Sharia.
In reality, a
fatwa is one man's opinion.
A fatwa
is one counsel's opinion.
A fatwa is an interpretation
of the law.
It's not the law.
So let's break it down. Right. Let's start
off with a linguistic
definition.
The word fatwa
comes from the same root interestingly as the
word fatwa.
What is fatwa?
Manliness,
youth.
Right? So this word, Fatwa, actually has different
meanings.
When using these root letters in certain context,
it reverts to you. That's why a young
person is called a Fatwa.
But in a different context,
the word Fata means
an explanation,
a clarification.
It comes from the idea that you don't
understand something, so you're asking an expert to
clarify it for you.
So fatwa literally means
a clarification
or an explanation.
Its
definition within the Sharia
is the
authoritative
opinion
of a qualified scholar.
The authoritative
opinion of a qualified
scholar.
The qualified scholar
historically is known as
a Mufti.
I don't need to explain what a Mufti
is.
A Mufti is someone qualified to give fatwa.
It's in the name. Right? A Mufti is
someone qualified to give a fatwa.
So how does this work historically?
Well, before we get into historically,
there's a bit more about what exactly that
a fatwa do,
Right? A fatwa is someone's opinion. It works
like this,
there are things that are clear in the
Quran and Sunnah, and there are actually very
few,
and there are things that are open to
interpretation.
The job of the mufti
is to deal with daily situations,
to deal with new situations,
to deal with new things,
to analyze it in the right of in
the light of the Quran and Sunnah, and
to arrive at a conclusion.
The conclusion of the Mufti is his opinion.
And what a lot of people don't realize
is the opinion of a Mufti is a,
it is speculative. It is something that is
open to being wrong. A mufti can be
wrong. It's something people don't understand.
Right? Sometimes you tell someone that their favorite
mufti got something wrong. They they act like
you're changing Allah's law or you're arguing with
God. No. A Mufti can be wrong. Any
Mufti can be wrong. Any Sheikh can be
wrong. Any Mawlana can be wrong. This is
an opinion.
Right?
Number 2,
a fatwa,
historically,
has been known to be non binding.
A fatwa is non binding. What does this
mean?
If you go to a Mufti,
right? Let's look at a very practical example.
You wanna invest in bitcoin.
So you go to a Mufti,
you ask him, is Bitcoin halal or haram?
And he tells you it's haram.
Are you obligated to follow that Mufti's opinion?
Is his fatwa binding on you?
It's not.
It's not binding on you. If you feel
that he did not understand what Bitcoin is,
if you feel that his explanation didn't really
make much sense, if you feel like he
may have got it wrong,
you have the right to speak to another,
to seek another opinion.
This is how he operated historically.
Historically, even under Sharia, in the even in
the Khilafat,
the opinion of a Mufti was non binding.
Even amongst the Sahaba,
there were Sahaba who were very high authorities
in fact,
but there were other Sahaba who said, I
don't agree with you, I'm not gonna follow
you. Right? Because the this is considered a
person's opinion
And this is the one aspect
of a fatwa that people don't understand, a
fatwa is non binding. It's not something you
are obligated to follow. If 2 muftis clash
with each other, you follow whichever one makes
more sense to you, whichever one seems to
make more sense to you without putting the
other one down, without being disrespectful.
The second aspect of fatwa on the opposite
side, why then do we seek a fatwa
if it's non binding?
We seek a fatwa because a fatwa is
authoritative.
Right? It's not
your opinion or my opinion, it's the opinion
of an expert.
So there's some authority to it. It's like
when you're sick, you go to a doctor,
right? Why? Because the doctor is the expert
on medicine,
So you will seek the opinion of a
doctor.
Is it simple to seek a second opinion
from another doctor?
No. It's not. You can always consult 2
experts.
Fiq is the same.
You don't make your own Fiq, you take
your Fiq from an expert to a mufti.
But there's nothing wrong with taking a pic
from multiple muftis, from consulting multiple muftis on
an issue. Right? So a fadwa is authoritative
and it can be used to justify an
action. So for example,
if people are arguing over whether bitcoin is
halal and you're telling me, but this Mufti
said it's halal. You now have the fatwa
of an authority to do it. You now
have the fatwa of authority to do that
action because
you now have someone who is an expert
in the field saying in his opinion it's
okay.
Right? The authority and authority in Fatwa is
so strong
that in the Ottoman era,
if the Khalifa wanted to invade another land,
he would have to get a fatwa from
the Mufti.
Right? To say that it's legal for you
to invade that land because people look at
these fatwa as authoritative.
That the Mufti said it's fine. It's fine.
Right?
The third aspect of fatwa that we get
wrong today,
is that fatwa's change from person to person,
time to time, place to place.
Fatwas are often personal,
and this is bringing the historical context. How
do fatwas work historically?
Every Muslim community
would have their mufti.
And again, if you go back to what
we mentioned over the past few weeks, there
were 2 separate power structures within the Khilafat.
There was the political power structure of the
Khalifa, who handled jihad and taxes and administrative
work, and there was the scholarly power structure
of the Muftis and the pardis.
Right? So what will happen is, if people
had questions, they would write to their Mufti,
and the mufti would answer their questions, and
they would follow what the mufti says. Right?
But these fatwas often tend to be on
issues related to business,
marriage,
family,
inheritance,
culture,
and it was understood
that the Mufti's fatwa
is for that person, it's not for everyone.
Meaning,
if someone went to a Mufti
and asked him,
you know, whether a certain business transaction that
he had done is permissible.
And the Mufti tells him, yes.
That fatwa is for him. It's not for
everybody till the end of time,
right? Because fatwas are affected by a variety
of things. They are affected by circumstances,
they are affected by culture,
they are affected by economics,
they are affected by need, They are affected
by necessity.
Fatwas change from time to time, and place
to place, and again this is something that
we mix up today. We find a fatwa
in a book 200 or 300 years ago,
and we feel like we are obligated to
follow it today.
Or we see a fatwa from a website
in Saudi Arabia, and we feel like we're
all obligated to follow it in South Africa.
It doesn't work like that. Right? There's a
lot of things that shape fatwas.
For example,
at one point in the Ottoman Empire, there
was a fatwa
that you are obligated to buy coffee for
your wife every day.
You are obligated to buy coffee for your
wife every day.
Is this a binding for people to follow
till the end of time? No. This was
a linked to the culture and economics of
that time and place. That in that culture
and that
women expected coffee every day. Right? That was
who considered their right. Fatwa are not binding.
You may find a fatwa from India 200
years ago saying that going to school is
haram.
That fatwa was not binding on us. That
was written during the time of colonization.
The colonizers were using school to brainwash people,
so the Muftis of that time and that
place made a fatwa for their time and
their place, that's not binding outside of that
society.
This is what we get wrong.
So historically,
a Mufti's
word was important. It gave authority to what
people did. It gave legitimacy to what people
did. If someone went around asking a bunch
of muftis if something is halal and all
of them say is haram, he got no
choice but to avoid it. Right?
At the same time, the fatwa of a
mufti is non binding. You are allowed to
seek a second opinion.
And I will end on this point.
A lot of people confuse this issue of
fatwa shopping, right? That if you see a
mufti tells you something's haram and you go
to another mufti, say, oh you fatwa shopping.
So is fatwa shopping
halal or haram?
The answer, it depends on your intention.
It depends on your intention.
If your intention is to ask a 1,000
Mufti that's when someone tells you what you
want to hear, then that's wrong. You shouldn't
you shouldn't go seeking what you want to
hear, you should seek the truth and follow
the truth.
Right? You don't go around seeking what you
want to hear. This is wrong. This is
the fact that shopping that is wrong. But
But if you ask a mufthier question, you
feel like you didn't understand the issue, you
didn't explain it properly,
his opinion isn't making sense to you,
you you there may be another opinion that
that makes more sense, there may be another
move that has a different point of view,
or you want to hear all the all
the different opinions on this issue before you
decide which one to follow.
There's actually nothing wrong with doing that. There's
nothing wrong
with seeking multiple opinions,
if it's doing your research or being
thorough or just wanting to have a stronger
opinion to follow, one that has more conclusive
evidence
so fatwa shopping in of itself
is not just
permissible, it's something that's Muslims did throughout history.
That is something Muslims did throughout history. If
they went to a Mufti and a Mufti's
fatwa didn't make sense, they go to another
Mufti. Right? And they will ask and they
will keep asking because a Mufti's fatwa is
not binding. So to conclude,
if someone asks what is a fatwa and
what is the purpose of a fatwa,
A fatwa is the opinion of a legal
expert.
It is the opinion of a legal expert.
The opinion of a legal expert can be
wrong,
but it has authority because he's an expert.
So you seek his opinion
to gain legitimacy in what you want to
do.
However, his opinion is non binding.
You don't have to follow it if there
is another quattoir that contradicts it, that seems
to make more sense to you. Right?
And historically,
the bhuktis
were
basically the ones that gave legitimacy to almost
anything within the Sharia world. In the Muslim
world, for something to be legitimate,
it was the muftis
who would tell you this is halal or
this is haram or this is legit, this
is not legit.
It wasn't the Khalifa.
It wasn't the governors.
It wasn't the military generals.
It was the Muftis.
Their word is what mattered most in the
Muslim
world. Their approval is what mattered most in
the Muslim world.
Unfortunately, we don't live in the Sharia lands
but still we should
understand that this position of someone being able
to give fat to us is a very
important position in our religion.
It doesn't make them a
ultimate source that you have to follow. You
know, they say we don't have a pope
in our religion. We don't, right? We actually
have a multiple opinions that you can follow.
We have many different scholars and it's part
of the rahma of Allah that there is
diversity of opinions.
So you can follow 1 Mufti and I
can follow another Mufti, and it's both acceptable
in the sight of Allah.
It's both acceptable in the sight of Allah.
So, we need to stop equating
the opinions of scholars with the Word of
God.
At the same time, we shouldn't look down
upon the scholars and make their word feel
nothing, but we should keep it where it
belongs, that this is an expert's opinion, or
the expert could be wrong.
Right? And that is the balanced approach to
what's what was, and that is how it
was,
done throughout the bulk of our history, and
this is the culture we need to revive
again. When we respect the follower, even we
don't follow them, and we but at the
same time, we don't treat their word as
if it's the word of God.
So with elections around the corner, I just
want to give one quick reminder about one
very important issue. It's not a fatwa.
Right? It's not linked to the topic of
fatwa. It's a separate issue.
I'm not gonna tell you who to vote
for. I'm not even gonna tell you if
you vote or shouldn't vote. I won't even
get into the debate of whether voting is
halal or haram. Right? I'm simply gonna give
one small reminder.
The issue of Palestine is not negotiable.
Right? The issue of Palestine is a non
negotiable issue.
I don't care what promises any parties are
making
to make life better for you. If it
comes at the expense of the Palestinians, it
is not worth it.
Right now, South Africa is taking the lead
in doing something for the Palestinians.
If we had to vote into power, a
party that is pro Zionism,
we will be betraying
our brothers and sisters in Palestine
for the sake of our own comfort.
I think it's a worthy sacrifice for ourselves
to make, where if it means that things
aren't gonna be perfect in South Africa, at
least South Africa is supporting Palestine.
Right? So I won't tell you who to
vote for, I won't tell you who not
to vote for. I'll simply say, do not
compromise
on the issue of Palestine.
Do not betray our brothers and sisters in
Palestine
because we want a better home affairs system
or no load shedding. Right?
These are not things that are more important
than the genocide.
Ending the genocide should be a number one
priority.
We live in one of the few countries
where the government is on the side of
Palestine.
If you wonder what life would be like
under a government that is pro Zionism, look
what's happening on the campuses in America.
Look at how they are shutting down freedom
of speech in all over America and Europe.
The same places that call themselves the land
of freedom. There's no freedom.
There's no freedom when you speak against Zionism,
so don't be deluded.
If those kind of people come into power
in South Africa, that's what's gonna happen to
us too. And our voices will be shut
down too.
And whatever
little that this country is doing to help
the people of Palestine, that will be over.
So do not compromise on that issue. Make
that your main criteria
in writing of certain parties,
that if a party
is pro
Zionism,
you want nothing to do with them.
We ask Allah
to help our brothers and sisters in Palestine,
and to grant them victory, and to grant
peace and justice to the Muslim world and
to remove all of the tyrants to their
region.
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