The issue of “fiqh al-waqiʿ” (jurisprudence of current realities):

During that blind, deaf and dumb turmoil, a variety of jurisprudential, methodological and daʿwah-related questions were stirred up, and—by Allah’s grace and favour—we were then able to furnish sound, scholarly answers to them.

One of the matters that surfaced in the aftermath of that upheaval and became the subject of much discussion is what some have chosen to label “fiqh al-waqiʿ.”

I do not take exception to the substance of this discipline for which they have coined that name—fiqh al-waqiʿ—for many scholars have stressed that those who undertake to guide the Muslim community and frame solutions to its problems must be thoroughly acquainted with its actual circumstances. Hence their oft-quoted maxim: “Passing judgement on a thing is contingent upon forming a proper conception of it.” That can only be achieved by grasping the reality surrounding the question under examination, and this is among the foundational principles of issuing fatwa in particular and of scholarship in general.

Fiqh al-waqiʿ, therefore, is the act of scrutinising whatever concerns the Muslims—whether their own affairs or the schemes of their enemies—in order to warn them and raise them up in practical, concrete terms rather than by mere theoretical discourse. As for speech that remains purely theoretical, with no one to adopt it in deed and translate it into reality, it ends up as nothing more than a preoccupation with the disbelievers’ news and reports, or a drowning in their analyses and ideas.