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increases the likelihood that readers will concur with his deliberations. But does this fatwa have relevance beyond the individual case at stake?
    Although the logic of this fatwa is internally sound, its methodological premise is too superficial to be sustained or applied more broadly, as it allows for almost any manipulation of the question to result in the desired answer. Would he accept the same rationale if it were not a convert’s marriage at stake but rather an unmarried Muslim woman in love with, and wanting to marry, a non-Muslim, and in danger of leaving Islam if she could not do so? What if it were two Muslim women wanting to marry each other, now permissible under civil law in certain parts of North America and Europe? Presumably, Alalwani
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    would approach these situations differently, but this fatwa does not provide any methodological justification for doing so.
    Alalwani does not suggest a broader differentiation between permitting a convert to Islam to remain married to her kitabi husband (where her apostasy from Islam was not feared) and cases where an unmarried Muslim woman wanted to marry a Christian or Jewish man. There is some textual support for this distinction; anecdotal evidence suggests that the first generation of Muslims viewed the preservation of an existing marriage somewhat differently than the case where no marriage yet existed. 58 The second fatwa, from the European Council for Fatwa (an all-male organization that includes North America-based Jamal Badawi among its members), does make this distinction, “affirm[ing] and repeat[ing] that it is forbidden for a Muslim female to establish marriage to a non-Muslim male” while permitting a convert to maintain her marriage under certain circumstances. 59 The fatwa acknowledges that “According to the four main schools of jurisprudence, it is forbidden for the wife to remain with her husband or indeed to allow him conjugal rights, once her period of waiting has expired.” The Council bases its dissenting view on “some scholars” (those named are Ibrahim al-Nakha’i, al-Shi’bi, and Hammad ibn Abi Sulayman) who held that“it is for her to remain with him, allowing him and enjoying full conjugal rights, if he does not prevent her from exercising her religion and she has hope in him reverting [i.e., converting] to Islam.” The Council’s rationale (“for women not to reject entering into Islam if they realize that they are to sep- arate from their husbands and desert their families by doing so”) is similar to Alalwani’s objective to prevent the convert’s apostasy, although the situation of one who never becomes Muslim is less dire than that of one who becomes Muslim only to abandon the faith.
    Both fatwas acknowledge their departure from the near-universal view on the dissolution of a female convert’s marriage. Neither, however, reconsiders the evidence on which that doctrine is based. Alalwani states simply that “the standard answer based on the Qur’an is that it is forbidden for a Muslim woman to be married to a non-Muslim.” 60 However, his
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    intimation that the Qur’an explicitly forbids such marriages is misleading. The Qur’an does not address the situation of women’s marriage to “non-Muslims” in general but rather dis- cusses specific categories of potential spouses such as “those who associate partners with God” ( mushrikin ) and “unbelievers.” Although both fatwas refer to a woman’s freedom to practice her new religion, neither discusses the relation of the cases at issue to the Qur’anic verse disapproving of Muslim women remaining married to unbelievers ( kuffar ). A woman’s conver- sion separately from her “very supportive” husband suggests her freedom of conscience and action. In contrast to the cases considered by these muftis, the Qur’anic verse explicitly treats the situation of women who had converted and left their husbands. The