Fatwa of the Wahdah Islamiyah Sharia Council regarding Guidelines for Friday Prayers during the Covid-19 Pandemic: An Academic Ijtihad Perspective

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic that has become an epidemic in Indonesia since early 2020 has had a negative impact on society in all aspects, especially in the fields of education, economy, social and religion. The Covid-19 outbreak can cause public unrest in religious matters where Friday prayer guides cannot be carried out in congregation in mosques considering that mitigation of the spread of the virus must be done by avoiding large-scale social crowds. Fatwa / advise is an answer in responding to this problem. One of the mass organizations in Indonesia, Wahdah Islamiyah, contributed to issuing a fatwa on Friday prayers during the Covid-19 period as a guideline for society in terms of worship. This research is a library research with qualitative research type. The approach to this research is a sociological-normative approach with descriptive analysis methods toward the fatwa of Wahdah Islamiyah advise about guidelines for jum'at prayers and mitigating the spread of the Covid-19 virus. The result of this research is that the ijtihad carried out by the Wahdah Islamiyah organization issued a collective fatwa using the ijtihad istis method which considers the benefit in realizing maqa>s}id syari'ah in the aspect of protecting religion and guarding the soul. The fatwa allows Friday prayers to be replaced with Zuhr prayers at home on the basis of the consideration of achieving benefits and eliminating fade from the transmission of the Covid-19 virus. The fatwa is the result of contemporary ijtihad with a multidimensional approach that collaborates religious disciplines with scientific and social disciplines. The fatwa of Wahdah Islamiyah contributes to the methodology of contemporary Islamic law which is also called academic ijtihad as an extension of Islamic legal ijtihad that takes into account social phenomena and the application of maqa>s}id syari'ah to contemporary problems through dimensional approaches from various disciplines.