Mohamed, Nabil YasienBayat, AbdullahPathan, Azhar2026-10-142026-10-142025https://hdl.handle.net/10566/25599This study presents a comparative analysis of two ethico-juridical responses to modern Muslim minority life. The first, fiqh al-aqalliyyāt, or the jurisprudence of minorities, was articulated in the 1990s by Yūsuf al-Qaraḍāwī and Ṭāhā Jābir al-ʿAlwānī and later systematised by ʿAbdallāh Bin Bayyah for Muslims in the secular West. The second is the tradition of South African Muslim scholars, rooted in the established legal schools (madhhabs), which has developed within a minority context over three centuries without formalising itself as a methodology. The study examines how each negotiates the tension between juridical rootedness (aṣāla) and contextual adaptation within a plural epistemic framework. Framed within Şentürk et al.’s (2020) Islamic multiplex paradigm, it analyses the juridical framework, legal discourses, and religious institutions of each across three case studies: meat slaughtered by the People of the Book (Ahl al-Kitāb), marriage to them, and interest-bearing mortgages. Fiqh al-aqalliyyāt grants primacy to facilitation (taysīr), public benefit (maṣlaḥa), necessity (ḍarūra), and need (ḥāja). South African scholars, by contrast, have tended to reason within the madhhabs through disciplined adherence (taqlīd) to inherited positions, whether permissive or restrictive. The difference thus lies not in degrees of leniency but in whether facilitation is itself the juridical aim: fiqh al-aqalliyyāt reasons toward accommodation, drawing on extra-madhhab purposive tools that prioritise accessibility while raising questions about the preservation of aṣāla, whereas the South African tradition reasons from within madhhab procedure toward the school’s determination. Given the dearth of scholarship on this tradition under minority conditions, the study argues that it constitutes a distinct and analytically significant model in its own right, not a local instance of fiqh al-aqalliyyāt.enComparative legal analysisdisciplined adherence (taqlīd)juridical rootedness (aṣāla)independent reasoning (ijtihād)Islamic multiplex paradigmThesis