Muslim Emigration to the West: The Jurisprudence of the Saudi Permanent Committee for Scholarly Research and Fatwas

Currently there are about 43 million Muslims in Europe, 20 million of whom are in the Western part of the continent. The birth of these pockets of Muslim groups is mainly due to migration, motivated essen-tially by economic reasons. For this reason, some Muslims turn to jurists (fuqahāʼ) to learn if the migra-tion they intend to undertake or have already undertaken to Western countries can be considered licit (ḥalāl) or not, under the Islamic law. For an answer to this question, some Muslims consulted the Per-manent Committee for Scholarly Research and Fatwas, whose members belong to the Pietist current of the Salafi movement. The objective of this article is to analyze all the fatwas passed by such a Committee in response to questions posed. My analysis has evidenced the fact that, according to this Committee, a Muslim is obliged to reside exclusively in an Islamic territory (dār al-islām), and forbidden to migrate to the West, due to the fact that it is considered land of the disbelievers (dār al-kufr). However, the Com-mittee has accepted some exceptions to this rule: for example, a Muslim is allowed to migrate to non-Islamic territories to spread the word of God (daʻwa), to study or to work.