The making of the fatwa

Abstract

This article examines the kind of expertise that is provided by Muslim actors specialized in Islamic Law (muftis) to their coreligionists in Europe. It seeks to understand how the production of this expertise (the fatwa) is organized and managed, and to what extent it is shaped by policy discourses in the West. The article thus seeks to fill a relative gap in the scholarship on Islam in Europe which has often reduced fatwas to ahistorical and fundamentalist rhetorics. Taking the European Council for Fatwa and Reseach as a case study, the author describes the settings, actors and logics of the production of fatwas in the European context.