Yusuf al-Qaradawi’s purposive fiqh: Promoting or demoting the future role of the ‘ulamā'?

Abstract

This chapter is about a high-profile Muslim scholar who rather late in his career turned to the now-popular legal methodology of the maqāṣid al-sharīa. Although I delve into some of the details of his legal theory, I am also interested in probing what is behind this strategy. A media figure of global proportions, Shaykh Yusuf al-Qaradawi has consistently seen himself as a leader of mainstream Sunni Islam with the God-given mission of leading it on the "middle" path (read "moderate," or wasati), away from the ultraconservatives, whether they be the literalists or Salafis on one side, or the liberal Muslims enamored of Western values on the other. Yet Muslims cannot find this middle path and stay on it, Qaradawi holds, without strengthening the authority of Islam’s legal experts, the ‘ulamā.