Abdallah Bin Bayyah

Abdallah Bin Bayyah (born 1935) is a Mauritanian jurist who chairs the UAE Council for Fatwa and presides over the Forum for Promoting Peace in Muslim Societies.¹ A former Mauritanian minister and vice-president, he lives in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where he is a professor at King Abdulaziz University.¹

He was born in 1935 in Timbedra, in the Hodh Ech Chargui region of Mauritania, into a family of scholars; his father, Mahfudh ibn Bayyah, was a judge and scholar.¹² He studied Islamic jurisprudence and its principles with his father, Arabic with Mohammed Salem bin al-Sheen, and the Quran with Bayyah bin al-Salik al-Misumi, and was then sent to Tunis for training in legal judgements.¹

After Mauritania's independence he served as minister of education and as minister of justice, and as vice-president to the country's first president.¹ He later settled in Jeddah as a professor at King Abdulaziz University, and chairs the UAE Council for Fatwa.¹³

He is president of the Forum for Promoting Peace in Muslim Societies, based in Abu Dhabi, and was a vice-president of the International Union of Muslim Scholars; the English article dates his resignation to 2014 and the Arabic article to 2013.¹² He signed the Amman Message and the open Letter to Baghdadi, and in 2014 he issued a fatwa against the Islamic State group.¹

The English article's religious infobox, referenced to the Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought, records his denomination as Sunni, his creed as Ash'ari and his jurisprudence as Maliki, and the Arabic infobox independently gives the Maliki madhhab within Ahl al-Sunna wal-Jama'a.¹² The English text describes him as a specialist in all four traditional Sunni schools of law with an emphasis on the Maliki school, and as a promoter of Sufism.¹

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