eINFAD: an integrated system for fatwa management and research

Abstract

The World Management and Research Institute (INFAD) is one of the excellence centres in USIM responsible for providing information and consultation on various aspects of fatwa management and research. The main objective of INFAD is to bring awareness to society on various dimensions of fatwa and their relationships to the implementation of Islamic law in different contexts and localities as well as to eliminate confusion concerning Islamic law and promote understanding and unity among the Muslims. ICT technology and knowledge management tools were used as the main vehicles to achieve this objective. This paper outlines efforts currently undertaken by INFAD to develop a comprehensive Fatwa Management System. The initiative started in July 2003 with the development of a portal to collect and disseminate fatwa in three languages i.e. Malay, English and Arabic. About 10,000 of fatwa and related information in this country and from some parts of the world has been collected. Continuous efforts to improve the portal to address current needs at national level as well as to provide more attractive information exchanges and dissemination platform at the international level is currently going on. The first step in this initiative is to find a standard ICT architecture that can be used to develop an integrated knowledge management system for fatwa management and research in this country. Among the main feature of this architecture is to help streamline content management in fatwa management at the various Jabatan Fatwa Negeri adopting decentralized information collection and dissemination system. A more intelligent search engine that integrate search across all the three languages used incorporating comprehensive computer-based fatwa taxonomy for global content was also developed.