The Fatwas of Coronavirus Era: The Reaction of Islamic Legal Institutions on Changing Realities

Abstract

The article examines the rulings of several Islamic institutions in the Arab world and Western European countries. The dramatic changes in people’s lifestyle caused by the coronavirus (social distancing, limitation of contacts, new hygiene rules, disruption of the usual way of life, etc.) inevitably had to be reflected in such sources. We focused our attention on four Islamic legal institutions located in Arab countries (including Al-Azhar which is one of the most influential) and three institutions based in Western European states. The main research issue was related to how the Islamic legal institutions’ positions differ regarding the coronavirus situation and whether there is a dependence of these institutions’ attitudes on their geographic location. We gathered a collection of fatwas and other official and semi-official documents issued by these Islamic legal institutions, reviewed some of them, and applied manual content analysis to the other part of the sources. We also intended to find out which topics worried Muslim scholars most of all and in which way – religious or secular – they most often covered their positions on everything related to the coronavirus. In the course of the study, linguistic analysis of the sources was also carried out. It was interesting to see how often specific legal vocabulary was encountered in the analyzed sources – a sure sign that the text transmitted with its use has legal authority in the Muslim world. The study revealed a barely perceptible but intriguing difference between these Islamic institutions’ positions towards the “Corona Crisis”. © 2021 Universitatea de Vest Vasile Goldis din Arad. All rights reserved.