Faisal Hassan

In the realm of fatwa, the extent to which someone views their audience to be both intelligent and morally responsible will naturally affect their legal conclusions and guidance on a topic. This is pretty natural. You wouldn't expect an illiterate man in the middle of a village to be addressed in the same way as an educated non-specialist. The villager is likelier to be held by the hand when presented legal guidance, especially when the issue in question carries multiple variables. Naturally, then, those with little confidence in their audience’s intelligence or moral responsibility are more likely to argue for unrestricted prohibition rather than conditional permissibility, or to appeal to prohibitions as preventative measures (i.e. Sadd al-Dhari'ah). In contrast, those who consider their audience to be both intelligent and morally responsible are likelier to teach them the boundaries of what is lawful and then allow them to navigate that area themselves. In this way, they ensure they do not change what is considered to be permitted by default, and also do not impose difficulty on people through unrestricted prohibition. They may even acknowledge that falling into the prohibited will occur at some level (as humans are fallible), and therefore remind their audience to consistently turn back to Allah when that occurs. However, the legal status of the act would naturally be more expansive. You can see this at work with several legal topics, including: (i) issues of culture (in relation to maintaining Muslim identity); (ii) approaches to contested bid'ah claims (and the ability to remedy a situation through mere education); and (iii) the boundaries of adopting a view (taqlid) in cases of scholarly disagreement (and whether one is capable of making their own sincere judgement on which scholarly authority to follow). These are issues that carry certain assumptions about the public or the audience one is addressing. The assumptions may be right or they may wrong, but they should at least be acknowledged.