Taha Jabir Alalwani

Taha Jabir Alalwani (طه جابر علواني) , Ph.D., is President of Cordoba University. He also holds the Imam Al-Shafi'i Chair in Islamic Legal Theory at The Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences at Corboda University and is an internationally known scholar in his field. Dr. Alalwani is considered an expert in the fields of Islamic legal theory, jurisprudence (fiqh), and usul al-fiqh.

Dr. Alalwani was previously the chairman of the Fiqh Council of North America.

Biography

Born in 1935 in Iraq, Alalwani attended and graduated from the College of Shari’ah and Law at al-Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt in 1959. He continued at the college and earned a Master’s Degree in 1968 and a doctorate in Usul al-fiqh in 1973. Dr. Alalwani then taught for 10 years at the Imam Muhammad ibn Sa’ood University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Dr. Alalwani emigrated to the United States in 1983.

Thought and Ideology

Dr. Alwani wrote about the Islamization of Knowledge, the need for Ijtihad, and is the founder together with Dr. Qaradawi of fiqh al-aqalliyyat (Muslim minority jurisprudence) which stands for making fiqh easy in order to enable Islam to spread in the West.

External links

* [http://www.cordobauniversity.org/welcome.asp Dr Alwani's welcome page at Cordoba University]
* [http://www.e-prism.org/images/tariqfinal291203.doc Shammai Fishman's Prism article on Alwani from December 2003]
* [http://www.e-prism.org/images/IdeologicalIslam.pdf Shammai Fishman's Prism article on Alwani's ijtihad September 2004]
* [http://www.futureofmuslimworld.com/docLib/20061018_MonographFishman2.pdf Shammai Fishman's Hudson monograph on fiqh al-aqalliyyat from 2006]
* [http://www.omedia.org/Show_Article.asp?DynamicContentID=2705&MenuID=726 Shammai Fishman's Omedia article on the political dimension of fiqh al-aqalliyyat November 2007]