The article concludes that religious leadership today, therefore, reflects both continuity with inherited Islamic discourse, and change. And in the rejection of some interpretations as extreme and unacceptable, the community itself increasingly assumes the role of arbiters of religious authority. But two features stand out: Despite differences in education, traditional and modern leaders share essential terms of reference in their interpretations. In the modern era, charismatic community members have joined traditionally trained scholars in offering guidance for coping with an unprecedented range and rate of change. Earlier eras saw the transition from prophetic to scholarly authority. As in earlier eras, epochal political upheaval has resulted in gradual evolution of perceptions of religious authority. Who speaks for them? Is there a leadership crisis among Muslims? This paper argues that far from there being too few religious leaders among Arab Sunni Muslims, there are more than ever. While global media have made terrorist leaders such as Osama bin Laden household names, few can name even one religious authority who represents the Muslim majorities whose rejection of terrorism is reflected in global opinion polls. The gravitation of some disaffected young Muslims toward radical demagogues has raised questions in recent years about leadership in Muslim communities.
This study proves that the teachings of Ibn Taymiyyah contradict the Islamic concept of God and religious and legal practice It was found that a certain number of religious and legal opinions of this religious scholar in matters of halal and haram contradict the legal norms of the vast majority of Muslims. In this study, the main approach was to study the works of Ibn Taymiyyah and compare them with the works of Islamic theologians, representatives of different madhhabs. The main purpose of the study is to investigate the ideas of Ibn Taymiyyah on some issues of Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh), to compare his views with the opinions of Islamic theologians and to define erroneous ideas about jurisprudence. Another problem of the study is its contradiction to the traditional Islamic concept of God. In addition, his belonging to the Hanbali madhhab in Islam is questionable. His opinion on certain issues provoked lively discussions to the point of even forbidding him to make conclusions on certain religious issues. Ibn Taymiyyah's ideas contradicts the unanimous conclusion of Islamic theologians on more than 60 issues. However, his answers to religious questions regarding the forbidden (haram) and the permitted (halal) remain understudied. Notably, some parts of his teachings became the foundation of the ideology of various modern extremist sects such as Wahhabism. Recently, the study of the legacy of a medieval religious scholar Ibn Taymiyyah, who lived in Syria at the turn of 14th century, has become particularly relevant due to the growing activity of various radical groups. In documenting what I call Global Shinqīt over the longue durée, rather than simply illustrate how the so-called Muslim peripheries shape central traits of transnational normative Islamic authority, I argue instead that mobility, historical circumstances, and scholarly performance combined are at least as instrumental in the credible articulation of authoritative Islamic knowledge as normative discourses issued by supposedly central institutions, personalities, and religious bodies located in the so-called “heartland of Islam.” In so doing, I destabilize the center/periphery framework altogether in order to explore how Islamic religious authority is actually construed and operates under shifting cultural and political conditions. I specifically examine how a number of widely different Muslim actors under changing circumstances continue to invoke, perform and re-invent Shinqīṭ/Mauritania.
Drawing on a variety of historical, literary, and anthropological sources, I historicize the rise and mythologization of Mauritania as a peerless center of traditional sacred scholarship. Thus, I explore the ways in which Mauritania has continued to asserts its relevance and scholarly authority on a global scale.
While previous scholarship has concerned itself mostly with Mauritania’s local intellectual history on one hand and its recent global fame on the other, in this paper, I document instead how, in less than two centuries, Mauritania has become not only a point of scholarly reference and symbolic/representational space of excellence in Islamic knowledge, but also one with an astonishing amount of global reach. Today, Bilād-Shinqīṭ or Mauritania is often portrayed as an unparalleled center of classical Islamic tradition supposedly untouched by modernity.
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