The Oran fatwa was a responsum fatwa, or an Islamic legal opinion, issued in 1504 to address the crisis that occurred when Muslims in the Crown of Castile were forced to convert to Christianity. The fatwa sets out detailed relaxations of the sharia requirements, allowing the Muslims to conform outwardly to Christianity and perform acts that are ordinarily forbidden in Islamic law. It includes relaxed instructions for fulfilling the ritual prayers, the ritual charity, and the ritual ablution.
About Oran fatwa in brief
The Oran fatwa was a responsum fatwa, or an Islamic legal opinion, issued in 1504 to address the crisis that occurred when Muslims in the Crown of Castile were forced to convert to Christianity. The fatwa sets out detailed relaxations of the sharia requirements, allowing the Muslims to conform outwardly to Christianity and perform acts that are ordinarily forbidden in Islamic law, when necessary to survive. It includes relaxed instructions for fulfilling the ritual prayers, the ritual charity, and the ritual ablution, and recommendations when obliged to violate Islamic law. The author of the fatwa was Ahmad ibn Abi Jum’ah, a North African scholar of Islamic law of the Maliki school. Islam has been present in Spain since the Umayyad conquest of Hispania in the eighth century. At the beginning of the twelfth century, the Muslim population in the Iberian Peninsula was estimated to number up to 5.5 million, among whom were Arabs, Berbers and indigenous converts. In the next few centuries, as the Christians pushed from the north in a process called reconquista, theMuslim population declined. By 1501, the entire Muslim population of Granada was nominally converted to Christianity, which triggered a series of edicts and proclamations in 1501 and 1502. These new converts, along with their descendants, were known by sources as the Moriscos. As well as having to accept Christianity and abandon Islamic rituals, they were also pressured to conform to Christian ways, including attending the church, sending their children to be instructed in the Christian doctrine, and taking food and beverages forbidden by Islamic law before the Reconquista.
Even before the forcible conversion, the predominant position of Islamic scholars was that a Muslim could not stay in a country where religious observance had been made impossible. Therefore, it was a Muslim’s obligation to leave, when they were able to do so, before the forced conversion. The influence of theFatwa has been described as the \”key theological document\” to understand the practice of Spanish Muslims following the Reconquistista up to the expulsion of themoriscos in 1564. It has been called the \”Oran fatwa\” by modern scholars, due to the word \”Al-Wahrani\” that appears in the text as part of the author’s name. In 1564, one of the surviving aljamiado translations was dated at 1564,. 60 years after the original fatwa. Some Muslims, especially those living near the southern coast, took the option of exile, but for most, publicly converting to Christianity while secretly continuing to believe and practise Islam was the only available option for surviving as Muslims. Some Muslims lived in the former Emirate of. Granada, which had been annexed to the. Crown of. Castile, and most of the remainder lived in. Aragon. The total number of Muslims in Spain was between 500,000 and 600,000 out of the total Spanish population of 7 to 8 million.
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This page is based on the article Oran fatwa published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 08, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
