Askimam

Askimam is an English-language fatwa website founded by the South African jurist Mufti Ebrahim Desai in 2000. Its answers reflect the Hanafi school in the Deobandi tradition. ¹

Desai, who had headed the Darul Ifta of Madrasah In'aamiyyah, started the site as ask-imam.com in 2000; askimam.org, a technically updated version of it, was launched in 2004 to help web users find answers to common Islamic questions. ¹ It held about 4,686 fatwas in August 2002. ¹

A 2011 study of its fatwas found that Desai's students in various countries prepared many of them, with Desai as the final authority: each fatwa closed with the line "checked and approved by Mufti Ebrahim Desai". ¹ The site answers only questions of fiqh, by the Hanafi school, suggests that followers of other Sunni schools ask their own scholars, distinguishes the opinions of the schools, and keeps its answers mostly brief. ¹

The scholar Gary Bunt saw in it the views of Muslims living as minorities in non-Muslim societies, with questions from many religious perspectives that reveal the challenges Muslims face today, and called it more comprehensive, influential and wide-ranging than the web resources of al-Azhar and its sympathisers put together. ¹ That is the scholar's assessment, attributed to him.

Its founder died in Durban on 15 July 2021; the site remains active. ¹ It has articles in five Wikipedia editions, among them Urdu, Hindi and Bengali. ²

• English Wikipedia, "Askimam", revision 1376121591. ¹
• Wikidata Q107550873. ²