by Farhat Mahmood

Created on: August 20, 2008

Contrary to Christianity or Judaism, Islam does not have anything remotely similar to a canonical hierarchy such as the Vatican and the pope so there are no real leaders of Islam especially in modern times.

Historically speaking Islam was disseminated firstly by the Prophet Muhammad and his companions and later by scholars. Scholars usually learnt the faith in one of the seats of learning such as Baghdad and Cairo and then went back to his/her community and taught the basic fundamentals of the faith. This is not to say that there were no pre eminent scholars such as Imam Bukhari and Imam Ghazali etc who wrote many books and discussed the faith and its complexities in greater detail and whose work is still widely available today.

A fatwa was given by a person in possession of a great deal of scholarly knowledge in the fields of Islamic jurisprudence and orthodoxy as well as an unblemished moral character.

In modern times however after the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire and its institutions by the British, French, Spanish and Portuguese empires there has been a huge vacuum left by the scholars who were either killed, persecuted or simply not allowed to teach the faith in its purest form. In modern times any number of people who call themselves scholars have taken their place and where previously a person did not become a scholar disseminating the faith till they had usually memorized The Quran and thousands of Hadith and had been rigorously tested by their scholars, now anyone who having studied a few bits and pieces sets up shop as a scholar and disseminates the faith to usually young, impressionable minds who have had little or no Islamic teaching from their parents or communities.

This patchy knowledge at best is the reason why some people are taking the road down the path of Islamic extremism. The fatwa's that are being issued are no longer issued by scholars who have dedicated their lives to learning not just the Quran and Hadith but also the etymology of the words used in the Quran as well as the historical context in which certain paragraphs of the Quran were revealed. Many modern scholars issue fatwa's based upon a very few general Hadith or for their own political and ideological ends.

There are now emerging some scholars who are regaining some of the ground lost to the extremists ( Zaytuna Institute) who can be found on the web and who also produce a great deal of literature that deals with many of the questions that Muslims and non Muslims are asking worldwide.

Islam cannot be learned and fully understood if some people who have a narrow and short sighted view of the faith are allowed to shout the loudest and get their message of hate heard by the greatest number of people as is the case at the moment. Until this trend is reversed and Islam again founds a stable system of scholarly and intellectual learning and discourse it will remain vulnerable to the weaknesses of this vacuum of knowledge.

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