To enter the realm of the scholar one needs permission

The world of the scholars naturally attracts everyone's interest from the outside. To some it seems bright, to others frightening and demanding. Those who want to enter this world, and those who somehow manage to enter it, are granted a share according to their own vessels; they take what their vessels can hold.

There are also those who want to barge into that world without permission, and those who take from afar only to defile and spill even what their vessels could hold. Their approach is not friendly, so their share is accordingly. With their paltry minds, with the heap of information they have put together from what they heard without effort, from their narrow, dungeon-like cells, they even presume to assess and judge a whole vast world.

Looking at what was written and said about Yusuf al-Qaradawi upon his passing, we also witnessed judgmental assessments of this kind. Setting everyone else aside, the strangest were those who criticized his adherence to Ahl al-Sunnah. I cannot find a word to attribute to the attempt to judge, in the name of Ahl al-Sunnah, a scholar who is perhaps the greatest living reference of Ahl al-Sunnah. Ignorance, Ahl al-Sunnah peddling, selling cress to the greengrocer, Kharijism, impertinence, wretchedness, or all of them. If Qaradawi is not Ahl al-Sunnah, then who could be? Or what is this Ahl al-Sunnah fantasy in their heads that has no place in any book?

I look at what they understand by the concept of Ahl al-Sunnah, and it has no counterpart either in Islamic history or anywhere else in the Islamic world today. They have cleverly stamped the "Ahl al-Sunnah" brand on top of a heap of innovations and superstitions that is their religion, and act as if they had thereby purchased the patent right. They never let anyone else use this brand. In this pursuit there is hardly anyone they have not slandered, nearly anyone they have not expelled from the religion.

In recent days our friend İsmail Kılıçarslan very aptly exposed this mentality under the title "There is no place for anyone in your community." They are so judgmental, so exclusionary, so perfectionist that, when you dig beneath, there is only their own delusions, their innovations, their superstitions, and of course their arrogance, to which they have no entitlement, and their self-admiration of themselves-their sheikhs. Is it possible for such a mindset to regard all Muslims as brothers, to be concerned about the ummah, and to try to find remedies for it?

As always, there are also those who criticize such a personality precisely for being attached to Ahl al-Sunnah with a too text-centered approach. Yet for those who say that the age has changed, and that the problems and language of the modern world must be answered with a new Islamic understanding, with a new paradigm within the framework of the traditional Islamic sciences, with a modernist, historicist new approach, Yusuf al-Qaradawi remains too traditionalist, too much Ahl al-Sunnah.

Yet Qaradawi had neither the time nor the concern to deal with such people. God also blessed his relatively long life, and he spent every minute of this life with knowledge, with reflection, taking the troubles of Muslims as his own troubles and trying to solve their problems. He wrote over 200 books. He spoke continuously, in thousands of conferences, lessons, television programs; he tried to enlighten, and issued fatwas. At times he also went back on fatwas he had given. There is nothing to be misunderstood in this. The principle of the change of rulings with the change of conditions and time was among the fundamental principles of his jurisprudence. His understanding of fiqh was so open to interpretation that it left no right of criticism even to modernists. Yet in these interpretations he drew the distinction between the "fixed" and the "changeable" very well, and on matters that could change he always sided with the facilitating, accommodating, problem-solving side, while not conceding a millimeter from the fixed elements of the Sharia.

Because of the length of his life, he saw very different times, and in all of them he was at the forefront with his knowledge and his struggle; he always wrote and always spoke. He saw prison, exile, ordeal and persecution as well, and also esteem and favor in the eyes of those who knew his worth. Thus a very large corpus of writings and speech came into being: over 200 books, over a hundred thousand pages of speech texts. That this corpus consisted entirely of repeated statements within a single context would never have made them valuable. Of course, it is an understanding expressed in a dialogical stance with the different problems of different times.

Moreover, he did not confine himself to one country and the problems of one country. As problems came to him from nearly every part of the Islamic world, he expressed his thoughts taking into account different cultural, political and social conditions. His thought was formed by visiting the different geographies of the whole Islamic world, on top of a scholarly career that began at al-Azhar in Egypt, and by being in dialogue with the scholars and people there. This alone is a virtue worth reflecting on in its own right. Although he began with the Brotherhood, he did not remain limited to the Brotherhood; he was not the man of any community; he was one who loved and cared for all Islamic communities, and whom all of them took into account and listened to.

Muslims are in different situations in different parts of the world: either a majority under oppression in Muslim countries, or a relatively comfortable majority, or a minority again under oppression in non-Muslim countries, or a minority able to live their faith freely. Poor or rich, in power or in opposition. Each situation produces different juristic situations for Muslims.

For all of these, Qaradawi, by developing the "Fiqh of Priorities," made a very meaningful conceptual contribution to the dynamism of juristic activity. The fiqh of priorities explained that it is no feat to do the same things everywhere at all times, and that fiqh is not a closed package of rules that can be applied in the same way everywhere.

He thought and spoke separately about the situation of Muslims who live under secularist oppression although they are the majority in their countries. But, for example, for those living in Europe under relative freedoms, he opened important doors for a broad production of fiqh through the concept of "citizenship." The "European Council for Fatwa," which he himself founded and chaired, would discuss, with regular six-monthly meetings, all the problems that Muslims living as a minority in Europe might face in daily life, and put forth their fatwas. Although these fatwas at times give rise to speculation, they keep alive the idea that there is a path as to what outlook, view, attitude and conduct a Muslim should hold on the basis of Islam at all times and in all places. That path is always open, and through such activities Qaradawi tried to set out the signs of this open path.

At the same time, he founded the "World Association of Muslim Scholars," which has members from Türkiye as well. Thus he tried to provide a touchstone for the reason and unity that were lacking for the ummah on a global scale.