Most academic accounts written on the “global mufti” Yusuf al-Qaradawi’s Arab Spring politics focused on his support of most Arab uprisings, explaining this support by his “revolutionary,” “modern,” “democratic,” or “republican” political thought (Al-Azami 2021; Al-Khatib 2014; Fadel 2016; Moosa 2015; Osman 2015). These accounts, however, do not pay enough attention to al-Qaradawi’s positions that do not align with the ideological positions attributed to him. Taking al-Qaradawi as a case study, this article answers the following question: How do “ideologically committed” intellectuals form their political opinions and actions during politically volatile times? I argue that in these situations, intellectuals adopt consequentialist ethical reasoning that is primarily concerned with the interest of their potentially threatened asabiyya (solidarity) groups. In the case of al-Qaradawi, he prioritizes consequentialist Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh al-maʾālāt) over revolutionary Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh al-thawra). Theoretically, this argument builds on Weber’s analysis of political moral dilemmas seen in the competition between “conviction ethics” and “responsibility ethics,” and Ibn Khaldun’s theorization of asabiyya (intense group feeling). Empirically, I chronologically order about a thousand primary sources about al-Qaradawi and his religious and political context, collected from news reports, books and memoirs, TV interviews, Friday sermons, and interviews with people in al-Qaradawi’s circles. Methodologically, my research design utilizes comparative and process tracing methods by leveraging al-Qaradawi’s political stances on different contemporaneous uprisings (the 2011 Egyptian, 2011 Bahraini, and 2013 Sudanese), tracing why his political stance varied over them.