Dr. Taha Jabir Alalwani

Dr. Taha Jabir Alalwani, was born in 1935 in Iraq and received both his primary and secondary education there. Afterwards, Dr. Alalwani left home and began a career as a student in the College of Shari’ah and Law at al Azhar University (Cairo). In 1959, he graduated with an Honors Degree. He continued at the college, and in 1968 was awarded a Master’s Degree, receiving his doctorate in Usul al Fiqh in 1973. Ten years following the completion of his doctorate, Dr. Alalwani taught Usul al Fiqh at Imam Muhammad ibn Sa’ood University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Following this, Dr. Alalwani came to America and immediately started work in his community.

Dr. Alalwani was a founding member of the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) and currently serves as the institute’s president as well as being a member of the board of trustees. He was a founding member of the Council of the Muslim World League in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. He currently also serves as president at the school run under the institute, The Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences, in Virginia. He is also a professor at this institution, and occupies the Imam Al Shafi’i Chair in Islamic Legal Theory. Since 1988, Dr. Alalwani has been president of the Fiqh Council of North America, run under the Islamic Society of North America. He is also a member of the OIC Islamic Fiqh Academy based in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia and has been a member since 1987.

He is particularly interested in the social implications of Islamic law, and is very active in the works of Muslim social scientists. He has a long list of publications, the majority of them focusing on Islamic legal theory. He has a few works in Arabic including his own edition of Imam Fakhr al Din al Razi’s Mahsool fi ‘Ilm Usul al Fiqh (The Sum and Substance of Usul al Fiqh), Al Ijtihaad wal Taqleed fi al Islam, and Adab al Ikhtilaaf fi al Islam (The Ethics of Disagreement in Islam). Among his works in English are Source Methodology in Islamic Jurisprudence, Towards a Fiqh for Minorities, Missing Dimensions in Contemporary Islamic Movements; The Qur’an and the Sunnah: The Time-Space Factor; Human Rights in Islam; The Position of Islamic Law; Crisis in Fiqh and The Methodology of Ijtihaad. Dr. Alalwani currently resides with his family in Virginia.