Date posted: April 28, 2013

A two-day symposium during which Islamic scholars from 80 countries will exchange views about ijma, an Islamic term meaning religious consensus, kicked off in İstanbul on Saturday.

The event, which is jointly organized by the magazines Yeni Ümit and Hira, is taking place at İstanbul’s Haliç Congress Center on the Golden Horn.

The symposium is titled “Ijma as a Common Roadmap and Collective Awareness.”

Among the speakers of the event are leader of Ennahda in Tunisia Rashid al-Ghannushi, Professor Ahmed Abbâdi, Muhammed Saad Ebu Bekir, former Egyptian Mufti Professor Ali Gomaa, Professor İsam Beshiri, Professor Muhammad Imara and Islamic scholar Selmân Hussein en-Nedvî.

A total of 4,000 people are following the symposium. There are simultaneous translations in five languages — Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic, English and French — during the event.

The editor-in-chief of Yeni Ümit magazine, Ergun Çapan, earlier said the symposium will be the sixth such event they have organized.

“Last year, we organized another symposium titled ‘Solutions to Social Problems from the Prophet’s Path’ in Gaziantep, which was attended by people from 60 countries. In a similar event in 2010, Islamic scholars talked about the ‘Prophet’s Path’,” he recalled.

Çapan noted that the theme of this year’s symposium was proposed by well-known Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen.

Among the participants of the symposium there will also be opinion leaders from Turkey’s East and Southeast.

The head of Turkey’s Religious Affairs Directorate, Professor Mehmet Görmez, was among the figures who made opening speeches on the first day of the event on Saturday.

Yeni Ümit, one of the organizers of the event, is a monthly magazine on Islamic knowledge and literature. It reaches out to around 100,000 people every month. Renowned Islamic scholars Professor Hayrettin Karaman and Suat Yıldırım are among the members of the magazine’s advisory board.

Hira, the other organizer, is a magazine published in Arabic by Kaynak Publishing. It reaches out to people in many Islamic countries. Among the contributors to the magazine are many writers, thinkers and intellectuals from the Arab world. It is published as a quarterly.

Source: Today’s Zaman, 27 April 2013

Tags: Islamic World |