Despite militants' frequent attempts to claim that mainstream institutions and scholars are irrelevant, mainstream narratives undoubtedly offer an influential role in Muslim and non-Muslim understandings of the Islamic regulation of armed conflict.

After all, mainstream institutions are widely recognized as authoritative representatives of Islam, and most mainstream scholars enjoy the legitimacy of traditional education, which is widely recognized as necessary for Islamic legal reasoning.

This chapter examines mainstream scholarship, with the hrst section examining official contributions made by government institutions and the next one examining mainstream works and thoughts of individual scholars. But official or not, this book argues that the government-controlled institutions and individual scholars examined here share a common feature that is rather difficult to define, namely being “mainstream.” Despite varying approaches, official and non-official scholarship share a common feature with regards to the issue of the regulation of armed conflict - both are keen to reftrte arguments made by militants and to defend the image of Islam by emphasizing the limitations posed by the legal tradition on the tactics of warfare.

As a case study in official narratives of armed conflict, this chapter focuses on official Egyptian institutions and looks at the role played by al-Azhar and the Egyptian Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs (escia). Both government- controlled institutions convene international conferences to address issues relevant to the Muslim world. Although conference proceedings theoretically represent the views of the participants, they are also practically a representation of the government-approved message on the issue discussed. As detailed later, the Egyptian regime has historically enjoyed a strong authoritarian grip over its institutions, and it is highly unlikely that approaches that contravene the government's interest would be given such a forum. The choice of Egypt is primarily because of al-Azhar. Although government control has eroded some of its credibility, al-Azhar has maintained an elite status as one of the primary institutions for Islamic studies, attracting Muslim students from around the world.

It is not, however, just an educational Instffirtion; it is an intellectual centre that plays a prominent role in shaping significant aspects of Muslim consciousness. As Zaman notes, “There is no single institution comparable to the Azhar of Egypt."؛

Al-Azhar tends to play a dual role in the development of Islamic legal positions on the issue of armed conflict. On the one hand, it is an educational insti- Prtion that houses academics from different ideological and political backgrounds, allowing for some diversity in positions and opinions. On the other hand, it is a government authority, whose senior officials are hired by the government and expected to conform to government policies. The main spheres of government influence on al-Azhar are arguably Majma' al-Buhth al-Islamiyya (“the Academy of Islamic Research," the Academy) and the Grand Shaykh of al-Azhar, who in Purn is a member of the Academy. During its first twenty years, the Academy regularly held conferences to address issues of concern to Muslims. The proceedings of these conferences are relied on as indicative of the more official role played by al-Azhar. The Academy also issues statements in response to current affairs. Although these statements might be a useful resource, three main challenges face the analysis of such data. First, the Academy lacks a filing system for statements accessible to the public. After numerous visits to its secretariat, I was able to obtain only six statements issued by the Academy and six issued by Shaykh al-Azhar that might be of relevance. A further challenge is that the statements are generic and lack legal argumentation. Third, some of them are undated, which means that a contextual reading would hardly be accurate. Accordingly, in this analysis, I rely solely on the proceedings of the conference as examples of the official role of al-Azhar. The other governmental forum for exchange of Islamic scholarship examined in this chapter is al-Majlis al-'Ala !i-l-Shu'Pn al-Islamiyya (“the Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs," the Supreme Council), which was established in 1960 by Nir.2 Whereas the influence of the Academy started to wane around the early 1980s,3 the Supreme Council became more active in the late 1980s, launching its first general conference in 1988.

Combined, the proceedings of the conferences held by these two government entities represent the view tolerated by the government on armed conflict from the 1960s until 2015, which is the date of the last Council conference examined in this book. Finally,

1 Muhammad Qastm Zaman, The Ularna In (temporary Islam: Custodians of Cage (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 150.

2 NaytaZmayP, аІ-^N^ajlls al-'aa Ii-Islnttal-IslamiyaNafaMisr 'ala l-'dlam, tarikhwa Yisala (Cairo: Matabi' al-Ovist, 1995), 7.

3 Jakob Skovgaard-Peterson, “Yusuf al-Qarawi and al-Azhar,” in GlobalMufti: The Phenomenon of Yusuf al-Qaradawi, ed. Bettina Graf and Jakob Skovgaard-Peterson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 45.

I also examine a 2014 conference, held directly under the auspices of al-Azhar, that addressed extremism and terrorism. This conference is particularly relevant to assessing al-Azhars response to the rise of ISIS.

In addition to official institutions, the chapter looks at two prominent independent scholars on the regulation of armed conflict. With the expansion of communication channels that allow for direct interaction between scholars and the public, mainstream traditional scholars are no longer influential solely by virtue of their participation in academic circles. Mass media is learning how to capitalize on the public's interest in scholars and their understanding of Islamic law. Accordingly, given the greater reach enjoyed by some independent scholars, the second section of this chapter examines individual scholarly approaches to the regulation of armed conflict by looking at the works of two scholars who received their formal education at al-Azhar but who went on to build a reputation independent of their initial affiliation with it, Yfisuf al- Qaradawi (b. 1926) and Wahba al-Zuhayli (d. 2015). Al-Qaradawi was forced to leave his home country, Egypt, after being denied employment at al-Azhar University for political activism;^ al-Zuhayli was a professor at the University of Damascus and seems to have maintained an independent yet non-confronta- tional relationship with the authoritarian Syrian government, as evidenced by his relative silence on the Syrian revolution, despite posthumous claims that he privately expressed discomfort with violations committed by the regime.5

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Source: Badawi Nesrine. Islamic Jurisprudence on the Regulation of Armed Conflict. Text and Context. Brill,2019. — viii, 273 p.. 2019

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Despite militants' frequent attempts to claim that mainstream institutions and scholars are irrelevant, mainstream narratives undoubtedly offer an influen­tial role in Muslim and non-Muslim understandings of the Islamic regulation of armed conflict.

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