هذا التقرير متاح أيضًا بـ العربية
Few figures in the contemporary legal and jurisprudential landscape can combine the precision of classical fiqh with the language of modern law. Among the most prominent figures to bridge that divide in the 20th and early 21st centuries was the Iraqi scholar and jurist Dr Abdel Karim Zidan.
Zidan was more than a traditional jurist applying earlier scholars’ writings to contemporary questions. He was a legal scholar, academic, and theorist of Islamic governance whose work significantly shaped Islamic jurisprudence and legal thought across the Arab East and the wider Muslim world for decades.
Roots and beginnings
Abdel Karim Zidan Bahij al-Ani was born in Baghdad in 1921 and grew up in the Souq Hamada neighbourhood on the Karkh side of the city, in a conservative Baghdadi environment. His father died when he was three, leaving his mother and grandfather to raise him and encourage his pursuit of knowledge.
He received his early education in traditional kuttab schools, where he learned to read the Quran and write, before moving on to Baghdad’s formal education system, completing his primary and secondary schooling.
His subsequent academic path brought together two intellectual traditions. He studied modern law at the University of Baghdad while also learning directly from Baghdad’s traditional sheikhs and scholars. In his youth, he joined the Islamic movement and worked within its ranks, eventually rising to senior leadership positions.
Zidan enrolled in the University of Baghdad’s College of Law and graduated in 1950. Seeking to deepen his understanding of the relationship between Sharia and modern law, he travelled to Egypt and joined the Institute of Islamic Studies at Cairo University. He later earned a doctorate from Cairo University’s Faculty of Law in 1962, graduating with the highest honours.
Alongside his formal studies, Zidan kept close company with Iraq’s leading scholars of the time, drawing from them his grounding in the Islamic sciences. Among his most prominent teachers were the eminent scholar Amjad al-Zahawi; Sheikh Abdel Qader al-Khatib; Sheikh Najm al-Din al-Waez; Sheikh Mohammed Mahmoud al-Sawwaf; and others. According to the testimony of many of his contemporaries and students, this gave him a rare juristic faculty, a rigorous and solid legal language, and depth in deriving rulings from their classical sources.
From the judiciary to professorship
Abdel Karim Zidan began his professional career in primary education. After graduating from the College of Law, he joined Iraq’s judiciary and was appointed as a judge in Baghdad and other cities, including Fallujah and Samarra. He spent several years on the bench, gaining practical experience in applying legal texts and seeing first-hand the gap that can emerge between legal provisions and the disputes people face in their daily lives.
He later moved into academia, where he found his lasting vocation. He joined the University of Baghdad and rose through the academic ranks to become a professor. Over the course of his career, he held a number of senior academic and administrative positions, including head of the Department of Islamic Sharia at the university’s College of Law, head of the Department of Religion at the College of Arts, dean of the College of Islamic Studies, and professor of Islamic Sharia and comparative law in the faculties of law and Sharia.
As Iraq underwent political upheaval and increasing restrictions in the final decades of the 20th century, Zidan left the country in the early 1990s and moved to Yemen. There, he taught postgraduate studies at Sanaa University and Al-Iman University, contributing to the development of academic fiqh curricula for a generation of Yemeni and Arab researchers.
He continued teaching and writing in Yemen until his death in Sanaa.
In the corridors of politics
Alongside his academic and legal work, Dr Abdel Karim Zidan’s ministerial experience in the 1960s was an important stop in his career despite its brevity, as it embodied his vision of balancing his intellectual and organisational position with public service from within the corridors of the state.
Zidan assumed the post of minister of endowments in the government of Prime Minister Abdul Razzaq al-Naif in 1968, during the presidency of Abdul Rahman Arif — for only 13 days, ending with the Baathists’ coup against Arif and the overthrow of his rule.
His selection for the post was based on several considerations, foremost among them his scholarly and legal gravitas. He was a former judge and a distinguished university professor at the College of Law, and he enjoyed broad respect in Baghdad’s academic and religious circles, making him an eminently technocratic choice to run a ministry concerned with religious affairs and waqf properties.
Despite his leadership ties and influence within Iraq’s Islamic movement, which operated under the name “Islamic Brotherhood Association in Iraq“, his entry into the ministry was not as a representative of an opposition political bloc, but as a national Islamic figure capable of bridging the gap between the state’s orientation and the rising Islamist current.
The brief period Zidan spent in the ministry focused on institutional matters and administrative reform, far from the political polarisation sweeping Iraq at the time.
After President Arif was overthrown, Dr Abdel Karim Zidan withdrew from political work and devoted himself to academic, juristic, and da’wah work.
Scholarly output between comparative fiqh and codification
Abdel Karim Zidan’s written output is the clearest indicator of his scholarly rigour. His works, which numbered more than a dozen, were distinguished by their avoidance of verbal padding and their focus on formulations grounded in Sharia evidence and comparative legal analysis.
His book “Al-Mufassal fi ahkam al-mar’a wal-bayt al-muslim fi al-sharia al-islamiyya” is among his most prominent and largest works ever. It spans 11 volumes, and it won the King Faisal International Prize for Islamic Studies in 1997.
This work is significant for its comparative treatment of questions relating to women and the family across different Islamic schools of jurisprudence, while placing their rulings in conversation with contemporary legal and social theories. The book adopted a rigorous and methodical approach to issues including guardianship, inheritance, employment, political rights and personal status, without either adopting a rigid interpretation or departing from the principles and limits of Sharia.
In the book, Zidan also set out a methodological and scholarly framework for Islamic da’wah, stressing its importance and presenting it as a disciplined field of study with a lasting intellectual and practical impact on its practitioners and students.
On constitutional and political questions, his early dissertation, *Ahkam al-dhimmiyyin wal-musta’manin fi dar al-Islam*, stands out. It explored a Sharia-based approach to citizenship, the rights of minorities, the political relationship between rulers and those they govern, and the Islamic state’s relations with other states in times of peace and war. Zidan drew on principles of Islamic jurisprudence while comparing them with concepts found in public international law.
In *Al-Wajiz fi usul al-fiqh*, he sought to present the science of usul al-fiqh, or the principles of Islamic jurisprudence, in a modern and accessible form, removing extensive theological and philosophical debates that he considered unrelated to practical jurisprudence.
He also wrote *Nizam al-qada fi al-sharia al-islamiyya*, drawing on his experience as a judge to examine the foundations of the judicial process, the qualifications of judges and the methods of establishing proof, including testimony, confession and circumstantial evidence, while comparing them with modern judicial systems.
His intellectual method between authenticity and modernity
In his research, Zidan treated the Islamic schools of jurisprudence as part of a broader and interconnected intellectual tradition. He presented the positions of the four Sunni schools alongside those of other schools, examined the evidence advanced by each according to the principles of hadith scholarship and usul al-fiqh, and then favoured the position he considered strongest in evidence and most responsive to people’s interests. He did so without adhering rigidly to any particular school, despite his early exposure to the Hanafi tradition, which was prevalent in Iraq.
Zidan also supported the codification of Islamic Sharia — the process of translating juristic rulings, including those on which scholars have differed, into clearly drafted and numbered legal provisions that can be applied by judges and lawyers and understood by the wider public. He argued consistently that codification did not contradict Sharia, but could instead serve it by reducing inconsistencies in judicial rulings.
On the question of political systems, Zidan argued that Islam did not prescribe a fixed model of government. Instead, he maintained that it established broad principles such as consultation, justice and equality, while leaving mechanisms of governance — including parliaments, the separation of powers and the peaceful transfer of authority — to human development and the experiences of different societies, provided they did not conflict with a definitive religious text. He addressed these questions in a number of books and studies.
Between da’wah and organisational work
Alongside his scholarly work, Dr Abdel Karim Zidan was also active in the broader Islamic movement. He became a prominent leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Iraq and served for many years as the group’s general comptroller.
His leadership was characterised by an emphasis on scholarship, intellectual development and avoiding confrontation. Zidan believed that social and political change should begin with building a strong intellectual and scholarly foundation and raising public awareness. He therefore approached his political activity through an academic and legal lens, a method that, according to accounts of his work, helped him and his students navigate the complexities of Iraq’s political environment while avoiding many of its pitfalls.
He was also a member of several international fiqh academies, such as the Islamic Fiqh Academy of the Muslim World League in Mecca and the International Islamic Fiqh Academy in Jeddah. Through these memberships, he helped issue dozens of resolutions and fatwas on contemporary issues, especially in financial and medical transactions and intellectual questions.
The end of the journey and the return home
The final years of Dr Abdel Karim Zidan’s life marked a new chapter of exile and scholarly activity, far from Iraq, where he had spent the first seven decades of his life.
During his years in Yemen, Zidan largely withdrew from organisational work and partisan political disputes, devoting himself instead to university teaching and scholarly research. He also remained active in international fiqh academies, contributing through correspondence, research and writing.
On the morning of Monday, 27 January 2014, Zidan died in the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, following a sudden heart attack. He left behind a life shaped by judicial work, teaching and decades of writing and research.
News of his death was widely mourned across Islamic academic and da’wah circles. Scholarly and juristic institutions across the Muslim world issued tributes, including the Iraqi Fiqh Academy, the International Union of Muslim Scholars and the Muslim World League.
Despite spending nearly two decades in Yemen, Zidan maintained a strong attachment to his birthplace. Before his death, he requested that he be buried in Sheikh Marouf al-Karkhi cemetery in Baghdad, near the neighbourhood where he was born.
His wishes were fulfilled. His body was flown from Sanaa to Baghdad, where a large funeral was held. Funeral prayers took place at the Imam Abu Hanifa al-Numan Mosque in Adhamiya, attended by scholars, academics, judges, politicians and many of his former students.
He was then laid to rest in the Sheikh Marouf al-Karkhi cemetery, returning to the city where his life had begun.
Zidan left behind an extensive body of juristic and scholarly work, reflecting a lifetime devoted to Islamic jurisprudence, teaching and intellectual inquiry. His writings and academic contributions would go on to form a significant part of the modern Arab and Islamic juristic tradition.