‘Fiqh for minorities’: On what basis?

Technically, a ‘minority’ is a community that counts for less than 50 per cent of a larger community. ‘Muslim minorities’ are believed to comprise somewhere between 40 and 50 per cent of Muslims worldwide (Auda, 2005; Khalidi, 1989). However, a quick look at the body of literature developed for the fiqh al-aqalliyāt (‘law for minorities’) shows that the basic consideration for Muslims to be considered an aqalliya (‘minority’) is not population. Instead, it is whether Muslims live in what is called a non-Muslim ‘country’ (Hoffman, 2002), ‘society’ (Rath, Penninx, Groenendijk, and Meyer, 2001), ‘context’ (Murad, 1997), ‘polity’ (Masud, 1989), or under ‘non-Muslim rule’ (Waardenburg, 2000). Thus, the ‘exceptional circumstance’ here is not about the number of Muslims, but rather about how the country runs its ‘polity’, ‘system’, or ‘rule’ – which can be labelled ‘non-Muslim’, as far as the current discourse goes. For this reason, the political view of Muslims necessitated the creation of a special law which is called fiqh al-aqalliyāt (‘Islamic law for minorities’), fiqh al-ghurba (‘Islamic law for the homesick’), al-madhhab alūrūbbiyy (‘European School of Law’), European sharia, or European Islam (e.g. Haddad, 1991; Hofmann, 2002; Ramadan, 2000; Rohe, 2001).

However, the questions that are typically raised under the ‘fiqh of minorities’ theme do not have a clear relationship with this basic premise.