About the Book
This collection of papers presents a reformist project calling upon Muslim intellectuals and scholars everywhere to comprehend the vast breadth and depth of the crisis engulfing Muslim thought today and the necessity of solving this crisis to enable the Ummah to experience a revival and fulfill its role among the nations of the world. The reader will find a variety of articles dealing with this intellectual crisis, these include a chapter on ijtihad’s role and history, important since our intellectual problems cannot be solved without the scholars’ use of independent reasoning and creativity. Another discusses imitation (taqlid) calling upon Muslim scholars and intellectuals to abandon imitation and to stop favoring the past over the present when trying to solve modern problems. Another looks at human rights.

About the Author
Dr. Taha Jabir Al-Alwaniwas born in Iraq in 1935. He was a graduate of Al-Azhar University, Cairo. The world-renowned Islamic scholar was an expert in Islamic legal theory, jurisprudence, the principles of jurisprudence, Qur’anic sciences, and general Islamic thought. He was president of the Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences (GSISS), USA; president of the Fiqh Council of North America; member of the OIC Islamic Fiqh Academy; and president of the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), USA. The prolific writer, who passed away on March 4, 2016, has to his credit many works including: Source Methodology in Islamic Jurisprudence; Towards a Fiqh for Minorities; The Ethics of Disagreement in Islam; Ijtihad; and The Qur’an and the Sunnah: The Time-Space Factor.