Fiqh al-aqalliyyat

The Muslim jurisprudence of minorities (fiqh al-aqalliyyat or minority fiqh) has emerged as a distinctive field of research in the wake of the post–World War II establishment of sizable Muslim populations in western Europe and North America. Although Muslims have lived as minorities throughout history, the minority condition itself was not considered worthy of systematic reflection on the part of premodern Muslim jurists. The current debate on whether Muslims should devise a new understanding of Islamic law for minorities is therefore a thoroughly modern one, engaging a wide number of contemporary Muslim scholars and intellectuals. The task at hand is to understand what is precisely at stake in this debate from a religious perspective; how the different opinions held by Muslim actors may relate to the positions they occupy in the global Islamic religious field; how these Muslim debates are shaped by conditions in the secular societies of Europe and North America; and what understandings of “Islam” and of the “West” they presuppose.