The fifth madhab
Why I joined the Blairiyya, what I saw inside, and why I left
by Citizen Jihadi
Looking back on my mispent youth, I now realise that I was a lost soul. I had been raised in the darkness of an old and rather dubious madhhab called the Maliki school — a tradition founded by an actual Muslim scholar, Imam Malik ibn Anas, who inconveniently lived more than a thousand years ago and never attended a counter-extremism workshop.
My understanding of Islam was painfully primitive. I had been taught about things like fiqh, usul al-fiqh, ijmaʿ, qiyas, and the annoying idea that sincere believers might disagree about complicated questions. I was trapped in the suffocating ambiguity of a tradition where scholars argued with each other, where certainty was difficult, and where nobody had produced a PowerPoint presentation explaining exactly which verses were “compatible with British values”.
Then came my encounter with the Prevent officer who changed my life. He introduced me to the greatest intellectual discovery in Islamic history: the Blairiyya School of Jurisprudence (madhhab al-Blairiyya).
At first, I was sceptical. Could it really be true that centuries of Muslim scholarship had been waiting for the arrival of a former British prime minister and a policy institute to finally resolve the great disputes of Islamic theology? Could the mysteries of sharia, jihad, the umma and the khilafa really be clarified through a carefully worded report written in excellent English?
The answer was yes! The fuqaha of the Blairiyya school possessed what earlier jurists sadly lacked: a unique methodology known as ijtihad bi-liberal-democratic-compatibility. Where the classical scholars debated evidence from Qur’an, the Sunna, and the principles of jurisprudence, the Blairiyya jurists consulted a higher source: the sacred scrolls of the Tony Blair Institute. Where Imam Malik preserved the traditions of Medina, the Blairiyya scholars preserved the venerable traditions of the policy seminar and the focus group.
Where the great scholars of Islam acknowledged human uncertainty, the Blairiyya school offered something far more comforting: a complete map of approved interpretations. No more exhausting disagreements. No more wondering whether a concept had multiple meanings. No more wrestling with the complexities of history. The mujtahidun of the Blairiyya school had already done the hard work for me.
They patiently explained that some Muslims had misunderstood Islam, while others had understood it correctly. Fortunately, the distinction was conveniently identical to the distinction between Muslims who agreed with the Blairiyya school and Muslims who did not. It was a revelation!
For many years, I was a devoted follower of madhhab al-Blairiyya. I memorised its sacred terminology: “moderate voices”, “counter-narratives”, “resilience”, “community engagement”. I learned the rituals of the school: attending conferences, producing frameworks, and performing the sacred act of distinguishing “political Islam” from “Islamism” in increasingly precise footnotes.
I even abandoned the crude old idea of takfir — declaring other Muslims outside the fold — because the Blairiyya school had replaced it with a much more sophisticated practice: declaring certain interpretations “problematic”.
Much more civilised.
But gradually, doubts began to trouble me. I began to notice that the Blairiyya school, despite its commitment to pluralism, had a rather unusual characteristic. It was both extremely confident about which Muslims lacked authority to interpret Islam and remarkably confident in its own authority to interpret which Muslims had authority.
I began to wonder: who had appointed the ulama of Westminster in the first place? Where was their ijaza? Which isnads connected them back to the Prophet? Was there perhaps a hidden manuscript, discovered in the archives of Whitehall, proving that the correct understanding of sharia had always been waiting for a government strategy document?
Eventually, the questions became unbearable. With a heavy heart and my tail between my legs, I returned to my ancestral madhhab: the Maliki school. Not because it gave me easy answers. Quite the opposite.
The Maliki tradition was frustrating. It contained disagreements. It contained arguments. It contained scholars who admitted that human beings might not possess absolute certainty. It valued maslaha, but also recognised the danger of pretending that one’s own preferences were divine revelation.
At first, this felt like a massive downgrade. Where was the glorious certainty of the Blairiyya? Where were the neat categories? Where was the comforting knowledge that every complicated theological question could be solved by identifying the approved interpretation? I sorely missed it.
I confess that sometimes, late at night, I still long for the warm embrace of the Blairiyya fatwa. I miss the intellectual security blanket. I miss knowing exactly which concepts have been reclaimed, which have been distorted, and which Muslims require expert guidance before expressing opinions. But nowI recognise this longing is a trap.
A wise man once spoke of negative capability: the ability to remain in uncertainty without desperately grasping for premature answers. The English poet Keats understood something that both extremists and bureaucratic theologians sometimes forget: human beings do not become wiser by eliminating ambiguity. Sometimes wisdom begins with admitting that the world is complicated.
And so my weary journey continues. I am still learning. I am still struggling with my nafs. I am still trying to distinguish genuine knowledge from ideological certainty.
It is less exciting. It is less dramatic. It is, frankly, much more boring.
But perhaps that is the point. Life is not a policy document. Faith is not a risk assessment. And jurisprudence is not a communications strategy.
Sometimes the most radical thing a person can do is accept that they do not possess the final fatwa.
Glossary
I was in two minds as to whether to include a glossary. The article is replete with Arabic words and these will not be familiar to some readers. Those readers will likely get the gist regardless. It isn’t necessary to master Islamic terminology in order to follow the argument. The unfamiliar words create a little friction, but the surrounding context does most of the work. By the time you read “Who had appointed the ulama of Westminster?”, it’s clear that ulama refers to some kind of religious scholarly authority. You may not know the precise definition, but you know enough for the joke — and the argument — to land.
Anthony Burgess made much the same bet with the first British edition of A Clockwork Orange, which is written in Nadsat, a fictional teenage argot that mixes modified Slavic words, Cockney rhyming slang and derived Russian. Burgess deliberately omitted a glossary because he wanted readers to inhabit Alex’s world rather than constantly stepping outside it to consult definitions. The reader gradually acquires the vocabulary through repeated exposure. Burgess trusted the context.
In a sense, that way of reading requires a little negative capability of its own. The reader has to tolerate not knowing exactly what every word means, resisting the urge to stop and look everything up. Understanding emerges gradually rather than all at once.
Children do this every day. They don’t build their vocabulary by reaching for a dictionary every time they encounter an unfamiliar word. Instead, they infer its meaning from context. The first encounter might convey only 10% of the meaning. The next adds another 10%, then another. Eventually the word becomes part of their vocabulary without any conscious effort. Reading works because we are remarkably good at learning language in this incremental way.
Ironically, this mirrors one of the themes of the article itself. The Blairiyya school promises complete clarity, neat definitions, and the elimination of ambiguity. The Maliki tradition — and Keats’s idea of negative capability — accepts that understanding often begins in uncertainty. Not knowing exactly what ulama, ijaza, or maslaha means at first is not a bug in the reading experience; it is a feature. The reader is invited to live with a little ambiguity, trusting that understanding will accumulate over time rather than arriving as an instant, authoritative definition.
Get Dylan Evans’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Nevertheless I decided to include a glossary at the very end of this blog post because there is an important difference between creating a small amount of productive uncertainty and creating an unnecessary barrier to understanding. The glossary is here not as a crutch to be used every time an unfamiliar term appears, but as a resource for the curious reader who wants to explore further. Ideally, the words should first be encountered in context, where they carry their full meaning and atmosphere; only afterwards should the reader consult the definitions and perhaps discover that the word they half-understood was connected to a much larger intellectual tradition. In other words, the glossary is a crude map, not a substitute for the journey.
One more thing: The article parodies the familiar radicalisation memoir structure popularised by writers such as Ed Husain and Maajid Nawaz: the innocent young person begins in a state of “normality”, is then seduced by an extremist ideology, enters the world of radicalism, experiences disillusionment, and eventually returns to a healthier worldview. The subtitle mirrors that of Husain’s memoir (“Why I joined radical Islam in Britain, what I saw inside and why I left”). The joke is that Citizen Jihadi follows exactly the same narrative arc — but with the roles reversed. His “radicalisation” is not into jihadism but into the Blairiyya, a fictionalised version of the liberal counter-extremism ideology associated with Blairite “muscular liberalism”. The beliefs presented by Husain and Nawaz as the sensible centre ground become, in the satire, the seductive dogma from which the protagonist must escape. The article therefore turns the standard counter-radicalisation story inside out: the extremist worldview is not the one being rejected, but the one that has defined the official understanding of extremism itself.
Blairiyya — A satirical, invented term modelled on Arabic naming conventions, meaning the fictional “Blair school” of jurisprudence. It is not an authentic Arabic word.
fatwa — A non-binding legal opinion issued by a qualified Muslim scholar.
fiqh — Islamic jurisprudence; the understanding and interpretation of Islamic law.
fuqaha — Islamic jurists; scholars who specialise in Islamic law.
ijaza — A licence or certificate authorising a scholar to teach or transmit a particular body of knowledge.
ijmaʿ — The consensus of qualified Muslim scholars on a point of law or doctrine.
ijtihad — Independent legal reasoning used by qualified scholars to interpret Islamic law.
Imam — A leader, especially in religious matters; here, an honorific meaning “leader” or “scholar.”
isnad (plural: isnads) — A chain of transmission linking a report or teaching back through successive authorities to its original source.
jihad — Literally “struggle” or “striving”; can refer to spiritual, moral, or, in some very specific contexts, armed struggle. The Qur’an uses a different word for “fighting” (qital).
khilafa — The caliphate; the institution or office of the caliph as leader of the Muslim community.
madhhab — A school or tradition of Islamic jurisprudence.
Maliki — One of the four major Sunni schools of Islamic law (see madhab), founded by Imam Malik ibn Anas.
maslaha — The principle of promoting the public interest or common good in Islamic legal reasoning.
mujtahidun — Scholars qualified to exercise ijtihad.
nafs — The self, soul, or ego, often referring to the aspect of the self that must be disciplined or purified.
Qur’an — The holy book of Islam, believed by Muslims to be the revealed word of God.
qiyas — Analogical reasoning used to derive legal rulings where no explicit textual ruling exists.
sharia — Islamic law or the divinely ordained path governing religious and moral life.
Sunna — The example, teachings, and practices of the Prophet Muhammad, forming a primary source of Islamic law alongside the Qur’an.
takfir — The act of declaring another professed Muslim to be an unbeliever.
ulama — The body of Muslim religious scholars.
umma — The worldwide community of Muslims.
usul al-fiqh — The principles or methodology used to derive Islamic legal rulings.
Hybrid or partially Arabic expression
ijtihad bi-liberal-democratic-compatibility — a satirical hybrid phrase. Only ijtihad is Arabic; the rest is English. It humorously imitates classical Arabic legal terminology.
Invented Arabic-derived term
Blairiyya — not a genuine Arabic word. It is a coined nisba adjective formed from the surname Blair, made to sound like the names of historical schools or movements (e.g. Ashʿariyya, Salafiyya). The article uses it for satirical effect.
