INTRODUCTION

It is often said that there is ‘no clergy’ in Islam (Haneef 1979: 94; Murata and Chittick 2000; Ruthven 1997). Up to a point this is true, mainly because Islam's religious specialists exercise no sacramental or priestly functions (Tayob 1999). Within Sunni Islam there is no formal, structured hierarchy of religious professionals, such as may be found in some Christian churches, or in some Buddhist monastic orders, for example. In the belief that there should be no form of human intercession between God and humanity, Islam encourages all believers to know and understand their faith and to exercise their own interpretive judgement. However, Muslims are also exhorted to learn from scholars with specialist knowledge of the Qur'ān and other Islamic sources, and to emulate the moral conduct of pious individuals.

It would be difficult to put an exact figure upon the number of Muslim religious professionals in Britain today. There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly, there are a variety of both formal and informal centres for Islamic religious training (dāru'l-‘ulūm). These offer programmes of learning at different levels, with emphasis upon the acquisition of particular skills or knowledge such as memorization of the Qur’ān, or study of the sources of Islamic law (Gilliat-Ray 2006). Not all graduates of these programmes will go on to become salaried religious professionals, not least because there is a shortage of employment opportunities for them (Birt 2005b: 687). They may nonetheless periodically perform religious duties informally, while pursuing more secular occupations.