Beyond the Global Mufti: Religious Authority as Political Action

Abstract

The International Union of Muslim Scholars, headquartered in Qatar, is an organisation of Muslim jurists founded in 2004 by Yūsuf al-Qaraḍāwī and led today by Aḥmad al-Raysūnī. Despite its importance in the current religious-political discourse in the Muslim world and beyond, this organisation received little attention from scholars, and no study to date has been dedicated to examine its claims and practices of authority. The central thesis of this paper is that the jurists of IUMS are religious and political authorities who: 1. embrace a wide range of “umma” issues, which allow IUMS to appear as the “authentic” and “autonomous” “guardian” of Islam; 2. play a role in international relations (ranging from Chad to China) as “supporters” of particular political actions; 3. negotiate a new type of religious authority embodied by the scholar-activist who emerged as a reaction to the deep religious and political transformations in the Sunni world. To conduct this case study, I approached IUMS from the perspective of sociology of religion (with a focus on the problem of authority) and relied on qualitative methods of analysis (contextualisation, descriptive discourse analysis, in particular), inspecting the local context of IUMS in Qatar as well the global context of umma politics, and using Arabic sources available on its website.