Ijtihad is an Islamic legal term referring to independent reasoning by an expert in Islamic law, or the thorough exertion of a jurist's mental faculty in finding a solution to a legal question. It is contrasted with taqlid. According to classical Sunni theory, ijtihad requires expertise in the Arabic language, theology, revealed texts, and principles of jurisprudence, and is not employed where authentic and authoritative texts are considered unambiguous with regard to the question, or where there is an existing scholarly consensus (ijma). Ijtihad is considered to be a religious duty for those qualified to perform it. An Islamic scholar who is qualified to perform ijtihad is called as a "mujtahid".
Liberalism and progressivism within Islam involve professed Muslims who have created a considerable body of progressive thought about Islamic understanding and practice. Their work is sometimes characterized as "progressive Islam". Some scholars, such as Omid Safi, differentiate between "Progressive Muslims" and "Liberal advocates of Islam".
Muhammad Abdul Muqtedar Khan is an Indian American academic and a professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Delaware. Khan is the founding director of the Islamic Studies Program at the university. He chaired the Department of Political Science and was Director of International Studies at Adrian College. He was a senior non-resident Fellow at the Brookings Institution from 2003 to 2008. He was a senior fellow of the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding from 2011-2014 and is a Senior Fellow of the Center for Global Policy since 2014. He earned his Ph.D. in international relations, political philosophy and Islamic political thought from Georgetown University in May 2000.
Khaled Abou el Fadl is the Omar and Azmeralda Alfi Distinguished Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law where he has taught courses on International Human Rights, Islamic jurisprudence, National Security Law, Law and Terrorism, Islam and Human Rights, Political Asylum, and Political Crimes and Legal Systems. He is also the founder of the Usuli Institute, a non-profit public charity dedicated to research and education to promote humanistic interpretations of Islam, as well as the Chair of the Islamic Studies Program at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has lectured on and taught Islamic law in the United States and Europe in academic and non-academic environments since approximately 1990.
AlMaghrib Institute is a 501(c)(3) Islamic studies organization founded in Houston, Texas, by Muhammad AlShareef in 2002. AlMaghrib provides courses on Islam in a six-day, two-weekend intensive seminar and other courses in a shorter, three-day, single-weekend format.
Louay M. Safi is a Syrian-American, a scholar of Islam and the Middle East, and an advocate of Arab and Muslim American rights. He published on such issues as social and political development, modernization, democracy, human rights, and Islam and Modernity. He is the author of 11 books and numerous papers, and speaker on questions of leadership, democracy, Islam, and the Middle East. He is also a spokesperson for the Syrian National Coalition, a league of Syrian opposition groups fighting Syrian President Assad, which was formed in November 2012 in Doha, Qatar.
Omid Safi is a Shia, Iranian-American Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University. He served as the Director of Duke Islamic Studies Center from July 2014 to June 2019 and was a columnist for On Being. Safi specializes in Islamic mysticism (Sufism), contemporary Islamic thought and medieval Islamic history. He has served on the board of the Pluralism project at Harvard University and served as the co-chair of the steering committee for the Study of Islam and the Islamic Mysticism Group at the American Academy of Religion. Before joining Duke University, Safi was a professor at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Prior to joining the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he was on faculty at Colgate University as an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Religion from 1999 - 2004.
Religious liberalism is a conception of religion which emphasizes personal and group liberty and rationality. It is an attitude towards one's own religion which contrasts with a traditionalist or orthodox approach, and it is directly opposed by trends of religious fundamentalism. It is related to religious liberty, which is the tolerance of different religious beliefs and practices, but not all promoters of religious liberty are in favor of religious liberalism, and vice versa.
Richard Foltz is a Canadian scholar of American origin. He is a specialist in the history of Iranian civilization—what is sometimes referred to as "Greater Iran". He has also been active in the areas of environmental ethics and animal rights.
Dawat-e-Islami is a Sunni Islamic organization based in Pakistan. It has several Islamic educational institutions around the world.
Ebrahim Moosa is the Mirza Family Professor of Islamic Thought & Muslim Societies at the University of Notre Dame with appointments in the Department of History and in the Kroc Institute for International Studies in the Keough School of Global Affairs. He is co-director of the Contending Modernities program at Notre Dame. He was previously Professor of Religion and Islamic Studies at Duke University. He is considered a leading scholar of contemporary Muslim thought. Moosa has been named as one of the top 500 Influential Muslims in the World.
Bayan Islamic Graduate School is a private, non-sectarian Islamic graduate school based in Orange, California with its campus located in Chicago, Illinois. It offers accredited Master of Arts degrees in four subject areas: Islamic Studies, Islamic Leadership, Islamic Education, and Advanced Islamic Theology as well as a Master of Divinity in Islamic Chaplaincy.
Elizabeth Ann Clark was a professor of the John Carlisle Kilgo professorship of religion at Duke University. She was notable for her work in the field of Patristics, and the teaching of ancient Christianity in US higher education. Clark expanded the study of early Christianity and was a strong advocate for women, pioneering the application of modern theories such as feminist theory, social network theory, and literary criticism to ancient sources.
Jasser Auda is a scholar and distinguished professor of Islamic law, in particular, the study of the higher purposes or maqasid of the Sharia. He is the President of Maqasid Institute Global, which is a think tank registered in the United States, United Kingdom, Malaysia and Indonesia, and has educational and research programs in a number of countries.
Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, is Thomas Lamb Eliot Professor of Religion and Humanities at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. He is the author of A History of Islam in America: From the New World to the New World Order and Competing Visions of Islam in the United States: A Study of Los Angeles. He is one of the founding editors of a book series on Islam of the Global West published by Bloomsbury Academic Publishing. Both he and his books have been quoted and referred to a multitude of times. He has been named a Carnegie Scholar by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and received a Guggenheim Fellowships Award in the Humanities for his work on the mosque in Islamic history.
Waleed El-Ansary is an Egyptian-American scholar of comparative religion, Islam and Islamic economics and the Helal, Hisham and Laila Edris El-Swedey University Chair in Islamic studies at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Shia Islam in Senegal is practiced small number of Senegalese people, as well as by the Lebanese community in Senegal.
Muhammad Taqi Amīni was an Indian Sunni Islamic scholar, jurist, Urdu author and the dean of Theology faculty of Aligarh Muslim University. He is known for his works on Islamic jurisprudence, and his book Fiqh Islami ka Tareekhi Pas-e-Manzar is a required reading for master's degree in Islamic studies at the Islamic University of Science & Technology.
Heba Raouf Ezzat is an Egyptian academic, writer and activist. She was a visiting lecturer at the American University in Cairo, and Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Faculty of Economics and Political Science of Cairo University. She is among the prominent Egyptian intellectuals who left Egypt after the 2013 Egyptian coup. Currently Raouf teaches at the Alliance of Civilizations Institute, Ibn Haldun University.
Karam Dana is a Palestinian American academic. He is the Alyson McGregor Distinguished Professor of Excellence and Transformative Research at the University of Washington Bothell, which is the first named-professorship to ever be established at the institution. He is Associate Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, and the founding director of the American Muslim Research Institute (AMRI).
