Wahbah al-Zuhayli

Wahbah Mustafa al-Zuhayli (1932 – 8 August 2015) was a Syrian professor of Islamic law, born in the town of Deir Atiyah north of Damascus. He chaired the department of Islamic jurisprudence in the College of Sharia at Damascus University, sat on the world's leading fiqh academies, and wrote more than 160 works, among them the comparative compendium al-Fiqh al-Islami wa Adillatuhu and the seventeen-volume Tafsir al-Munir. He was a signatory of the Amman Message and of A Common Word.¹²

He was born in Deir Atiyah in 1932; his father was a farmer who, the Arabic article adds, had memorised the Qur'an and worked in trade. He took his primary schooling in his home town and his sharia secondary schooling in Damascus, graduating in 1952 at the top of his class, and also obtained the literary general secondary certificate.¹²

At al-Azhar he graduated at the top of his class in 1956 and received an ijaza in teaching Arabic. Alongside his Azhar studies he read law at Ain Shams University in Cairo, taking his bachelor's degree magna cum laude in 1957, then a master's in law at Cairo University in 1959, and in 1963 a doctorate with honours in law, majoring in Islamic sharia, with a thesis on the influences of war on Islamic jurisprudence — a comparative study of the eight schools of law and secular international law, supervised by Muhammad Salam Madkur.¹²

His teachers in Damascus included Mahmud Yasin in hadith, Mahmud al-Rankusi in creed, Hasan al-Shatti in inheritance law and Hashim al-Khatib in Shafi'i fiqh; in Egypt they included Shaykh al-Azhar Mahmud Shaltut, Abd al-Rahman Taj, Isa Mannun in comparative fiqh, Jad al-Rabb Ramadan and Mahmud Abd al-Dayim in Shafi'i fiqh, and Muhammad Abu Zahra in advanced studies of comparative fiqh and usul al-fiqh.²

From 1963 he taught at Damascus University, where he became professor in 1975, lecturing in the colleges of sharia and law and specialising in Islamic law, legal philosophy and comparative legal systems; he chaired the department of Islamic jurisprudence and its schools in the College of Sharia and designed the college's curriculum in the late 1960s. He taught as a visiting professor at the University of Benghazi in Libya (1972–1974), the United Arab Emirates University (1984–1989), the University of Khartoum and the Islamic University of Riyadh, and taught legal writing and evidence to graduate students in Sudan, Pakistan and elsewhere.¹

He was a member of the Royal Society for Research on Islamic Civilization (the Aal al-Bayt Foundation in Amman), of the Syrian Majlis al-Ifta, and of the Islamic fiqh academies of Jeddah, the United States, India and Sudan, and chaired a research institute for Islamic financial institutions; he also advised Islamic financial companies. In Malaysia's official reception of the Hijri year 2008, held at Putrajaya, he received the award for best Islamic personality, and he was listed in The Muslim 500.¹²

He was also a preacher: an imam and preacher at the Othman Mosque in Damascus and a summer preacher at the Badr Mosque in Deir Atiyah, appearing often on television and radio and in the Arab press.¹

In his responsa he defended the Ash'ari and Maturidi schools of belief as orthodox and defended the lay Muslim's option of following a madhhab, while holding that following one of the four schools is not itself obligatory: what is obligatory is to follow a competent mufti with a proper ijaza. He permitted celebrating the Prophet ﷺ's birthday under conditions, defended beseeching God through the intercession of prophets and saints (tawassul) as permitted by the people of the Sunna, and divided Sufism into a praiseworthy kind agreed with the Qur'an and Sunna and a blameworthy kind of excess and innovation. He was partially critical of Wahhabism and Salafism — calling anthropomorphism a manifest error and condemning Salafis who advocated violence — while insisting that the Wahhabis are not disbelievers and recording his dislike of argumentation with them.¹

On international law he argued that the basis of relations between Muslims and non-Muslim countries is peace, that combative jihad is permissible only against aggression, in aid of victims of injustice, or in self-defence, and that non-combatants must not be killed nor war waged to force conversion.¹

His works number more than 160. The best known are al-Fiqh al-Islami wa Adillatuhu ("Islamic Jurisprudence and its Proofs"), an eight-volume comparative survey translated into Turkish, Urdu, Malay and Persian; Usul al-Fiqh al-Islami and its abridgement al-Wajiz; his doctoral study Athar al-Harb fi al-Fiqh al-Islami; Financial Transactions in Islamic Jurisprudence; al-'Alaqat al-Dawliyya fi al-Islam on international relations; and the Qur'an commentary Tafsir al-Munir. He also wrote short primers presenting each of the four schools — Shafi'i, Maliki, Hanafi and Hanbali — in turn.¹²

The museum records him as sunni-shafii, documented, on a text-plus-infobox configuration, and flags the configuration in his data record: the Urdu article's text states that he was a follower of Shafi'i fiqh, and the English, Arabic and Urdu infoboxes all give his jurisprudence or madhhab as Shafi'i. The Arabic and English texts do not name his madhhab in prose. His Ash'ari creed, given in the English infobox and the articles' filings, is recorded in the data note only.³¹²

He died at Damascus on Saturday 23 Shawwal 1436 AH, 8 August 2015, aged about eighty-three. One sentence in the English article's biography section gives 9 August against its own lead and infobox; the record follows 8 August, with the Arabic article and Wikidata.²⁴

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