b. 1935 · Mauritania and United Arab Emirates · Mālikī jurist, chairman of the UAE Council for Fatwa, president of the Forum for Promoting Peace in Muslim Societies
Abdallah bin Mahfuz bin Bayyah was born in 1935 in Timbédra, in what was then French Mauritania, into a family of scholars. He began his studies with his father, Mahfuz, and learned Arabic and the Qur’an with local teachers before pursuing the full range of the Islamic sciences, with a particular focus on Mālikī law. As a young man he went to Tunis to study legal rulings.
Back in Mauritania he entered public life and served as minister of education and later minister of justice, and held a senior post under the country’s first president. He later moved to Saudi Arabia, where he taught legal methodology, the Qur’an and Arabic at King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah. He has sat on several fiqh and fatwa bodies, including the Islamic Fiqh Council, the European Council for Fatwa and Research, and the International Union of Muslim Scholars, from which he resigned in 2014. He signed the Amman Message and, after the Arab uprisings, founded the Forum for Promoting Peace in Muslim Societies in Abu Dhabi. In 2017 he became chairman of the UAE Council for Fatwa.
His writing is mainly in Arabic and deals with legal theory (uṣūl al-fiqh), the objectives of the law (maqāṣid), financial transactions, the craft of the fatwa and fiqh for Muslim minorities, human rights and terrorism. He is a promoter of the Sufi tradition within orthodox Sunnism, and his political positions since 2011 have been the subject of scholarly debate.
