Shaykh Abdullah bin Bayyah visited the Bay Area in the last week of July 1999. He offered a week long course on Usool al-Fiqh in Fremont, California. He then gave a talk on July 31, 1999 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, California. An edited transcription of that talk appears below.

 Shaykh Abdallah bin Bayyah grew up in one of the eastern provinces in West Africa in Mauritania. From a very young age, he showed extreme gifts intellectually and a profound ability to absorb a lot of information and a lot of the text. During his studies, he memorized an extraordinary number of texts. Then, at a very early age, he was appointed with a group of people to study legal judgements in Tunis and went there for a period of time. When he returned to Mauritania, he became a minister of education and later, a minister of justice. He was also one of the vice-presidents of the first president of Mauritania. However, due to the conditions in Mauritania and the military change of governments that took place, he began to teach, and he ended up going to Saudi Arabia and becoming a distinguished professor at The University of Usool al-Fiqh.

 The shaykh is presently involved in several organizations in the Muslim world, such as the organization which is known as Al Majma' al-Fiqhi, which is comprised of a body of scholars that come together from all over the Muslim world and from all the different madhhabs and different viewpoints; they analyze and study a lot of the modern issues to come up with Islamic solutions to the issues confronting modern Muslims in the modern world. One of the areas of expertise that he has is in what is know as fiqh al-aqaliyaat which is the fiqh or juristic rulings related to minority Muslims. [Bismillah irahman iraheem. The shaykh began his talk by praising Allah subhaana wa ta'aala and sending prayers on the Messenger of Allah, sallallaahu 'alayhi wa sallam.]

 "I wanted to speak tonight about your conditions, your circumstances here. You are a group that is small in number and yet strong in faith, a group that has diverse ideas and understandings and whose individuals come from many different cultural and ethnic backgrounds, a group that is few amongst a dominant group that is many. The dominant group is strong in many areas; in fact, they are controlling many areas of the world. I would like to speak tonight about what the priorities of such a group would be: What are the obligations of such a group? What are the responsibilities of such a group? I would like to present some ideas to you, and I hopes that Allah subhaana wa ta'aala helps me to present some ideas that relate to a methodology, to approaches, and to things that will be beneficial to this group if they implement them.

 One of the disasters of the situation that we find ourselves in here is that you have Muslims making hijra to these lands from the Muslim world bringing their baggage along with them. So, they are bringing all of these problems with them that have nothing to do with the new circumstances they find themselves in. Furthermore, the challenges that they have in these new circumstances are so great that these problems that they are opening up are causing all kinds of trouble for them. Thus, the are not able to unite. They are not able to do things to benefit them because they are arguing about all these ridiculous things.

The full transcript of this talk may be found here, on Zaytuna Institute's site.