Voices of Islam (233 page)

Ijtihad
shared
jihad
’s ethical force but pertained to the realm of abstractions, ideas, and critical thought in the endeavor to find solutions by expending extreme effort. Fazlur Rahman speaks of
ijtihad
as an intellectual and moral
jihad
but, more concretely, as ‘‘the effort to understand the meaning of a relevant text or precedent in the past, containing a rule, and to alter that rule by extending or restricting or otherwise modifying it in such a manner that a new situation can be subsumed under it by a new solution.’’
49
Weiss contends that
ijtihad
’s primary semantic field originated in ancient Arabia’s harsh agrarian culture, so familiar to the Prophet’s first followers, most of whom had experienced oasis agriculture at fi hand. The word conjured up in their minds ‘‘the image of the cultivator toiling daily under the sun, struggling against the adversities of climate, weed, and sometimes intractable soil.’’ He continues: ‘‘Given the diffi ulties encoun- tered in the work of formulating the law, the jurists saw this work as a kind of toil and customarily called it
ijtihad
(‘toil,’ ‘arduous effort,’ ‘striving’).’’
50
To engage in the process of
ijtihad
is an Islamic religious duty of the first magnitude. As George Makdisi notes, it was the imperative to perform
ijti- had
that led to the formation of the classical schools of Islamic law.
51
All Muslim denominations had
ijtihad
traditions, although certain schools within each denomination put greater restrictions upon it than others. As we have seen, all Muslims upheld the validity of the famous hadith: ‘‘Every innovation is misguidance.’’ But none understood it as contradicting the necessity of
ijtihad,
however much they differed on details that governed

the process.
52

What made
ijtihad
inherently optimistic was the Prophet’s promise that those who practiced it would be rewarded in the next world, even if their answers were wrong. The Prophet stated: ‘‘If a judge [
hakim
] does
ijtihad
and gets the right answer, he receives two rewards, and, if he is [honestly] mistaken, he gets one.’’
53
Similar transmissions asserted that every person performing
ijtihad
was ultimately right—even if technically wrong—which prompted theologians and jurists to debate whether truth was singular or multifaceted in nature and raised the question of there being more than one

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Voices of Change

correct answer for any given question. Some argued that all dissenting legal opinions could be correct in their own right, despite the fact that they were mutually contradictory.
54
Abu Hanifa, eponym of the largest Sunni school of law, said: ‘‘Every
mujtahid
(person performing
ijtihad
) is right, although [ultimate] truth in God’s presence is [only] one.’’ He explained that a
mujtahid
who fails to discover God’s ultimate truth is, nevertheless, deemed right by virtue of the integrity of his personal
ijtihad.
55
The majority of scholars were content simply to say that every
mujtahid
receives a reward when mistaken, not by virtue of the error but because of obedience to God in fulfilling the command to undergo the labor of
ijtihad.
56

Like
bid‘a,
a pertinent question regarding
ijtihad
concerned the domains where it was valid and where it was not. Many restricted
ijtihad
to nonritualistic matters, but their opinion was not a matter of consensus. ‘Umar’s institution of the Ramadan night prayers clearly belonged to the ritualistic domain, as we have seen, and, in Baji’s opinion, was a consummate example of
ijtihad.
It must be noted, however, that Baji discerned an important political (nonritualistic) dimension behind ‘Umar’s decision. The practice of people praying the Ramadan night prayer individually or in small groups had the potential to prove divisive in times of civil discord. A single, unifi group of worshippers symbolized and reinforced the community’s cohesiveness, but disparate congregations praying at the same time in a common space behind different prayer leaders could—and probably would—be manipulated in times of trouble to underscore factional divisions and accentuate political rivalries.
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Ijtihad
was a function of the jurisconsult’s membership in society.
58

Because the masses were untrained in the religious sciences, classical tradition required them to follow the scholars. Thus,
ijtihad
was not meant to be an ivory-tower pursuit but a living ‘‘social partnership’’ between legal scholars and the society at large, which continually presented them with ‘‘real legal problems’’ and ‘‘questions to work with.’’
59
But even the common people were required to perform their own type of
ijtihad
by striving to discern the competence of individual scholars and selecting the best to follow, a principle emphatically asserted by the majority of the Sunni and Shiite schools.
60

Ijtihad
is a perpetual obligation. A well-known maxim of Islamic law asserts: ‘‘There shall be no denunciation of changed legal judgments with changing times, places, and circumstances.’’
61
Al-Dabbusi, a prominent Sunni jurist, noted that what may be allowable in one time or place may become prohibited in another because of changing circumstances, just as what was prohibited may become allowable by the same criterion. He added that changing times and places are not the only considerations; there are other ones as well, like the social group a person belongs to. What is benefi- cial for one segment of society may be harmful for another.
62

The renowned Sunni jurist al-Qarafi asserted that it was a matter of con- sensus that scholars were wrong to hand down legal judgments without

Creativity, Innovation, and Heresy in Islam
13

performing
ijtihad
but merely by adhering strictly to ancient texts in their books without regard for cultural realities. The fault of such jurists was inex- cusable and constituted disobedience of God. Their blind adherence to their legal compendia was misguidance in the religion of Islam and violated the original objectives behind the rulings of the earlier scholars and great person- ages of the past whom they claimed to be following.
63
A great jurist of the next generation, Ibn al-Qayyim, commented on al-Qarafi’s opinion, saying:

This is pure understanding of the law. Whoever issues legal rulings to the people merely on the basis of what is transmitted in the compendia despite differences in their customs, usages, times, places, conditions, and the special circumstances of their situations has gone astray and leads others astray. His crime against the religion is greater than the crime of a physician who gives people medical prescriptions without regard to the differences of their climes, norms, the times they live in, and their physical conditions but merely in accordance with what he fi written down in some medical book about people with similar anatomies. Such is an ignorant physician; the other is an ignorant jurisconsult

but more detrimental.
64

Undoubtedly, many traditional jurists not only failed to live up to the standards of Qarafi and Ibn Qayyim but also demonstrated an exasperating lack of creativity and stifl its spirit in others. Their rigidity created the widespread impression among Muslims and Westerners alike (including a surprising number of present-day academics and writers of good standing) that ‘‘the door of
ijtihad
’’ was ‘‘closed’’ as a matter of religious principle. The conspicuous decline of
ijtihad
at certain periods of Islamic history reflected a general social and intellectual malaise but not legal or theological doctrine. In fact, there is little historical evidence that the door of
ijtihad
was ever closed, and, in any case, since Islam has nothing comparable to an ecclesiastical hierarchy, the door of
ijtihad
never had a doorkeeper.
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The question of who was qualifi to perform
ijtihad
was not set by the Prophet but by traditional scholars. Their stipulations typically required that a
mujtahid
be an upright Muslim of sound mind with full command of the Arabic language and mastery of the core disciplines of Islamic learning, including knowledge of the Qur’an and
Sunna,
consensus, methods of legal reasoning, and the overriding objectives of the law.
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It is to the jurists’ credit that they did not list gender as pertinent to the requirements for
ijtihad,
and Islamic intellectual history contains several examples of famous women who excelled in the art. Fatima bint Muhammad al-Samarqandi, for example, who lived in twelfth-century
CE
Syria, ranks as an eminent
mujtahida.
She wrote and taught several works on Hadith and Islamic law, and her husband, Abu Bakr al-Kasani, author of the unique legal compendium
Bada‘i al-Sana‘i
(Marvels of Things Devised) and one of the most brilliant Sunni jurists, never issued a legal opinion based on his personal
ijtihad
unless his wife, Fatima, reviewed and signed it first.
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Voices of Change

For more than a millennium, the process of speculative
ijtihad
was virtually the monopoly of traditional scholars, and the requirements they set for it remained largely unchallenged. Their control over
ijtihad
was first systematically called into question during the pivotal eighteenth century— the eve of Muslim modernity—when various Sunni and Shi‘i revivalists demanded easier criteria.
68
As a rule, the revisionists of both camps leaned in favor of a textual literalism easy for the common people to grasp but alien to the dominant Sunni and Shi‘i traditions. A similar emphasis on literalism reemerged as the major tendency of Muslim Activist (fundamentalist) thought in the twentieth century.

Conceptualization of
ijtihad
underwent even more radical change after the full onslaught of colonial rule and Western modernity in the nineteenth century. New approaches to education and
ijtihad
became primary concerns for the Muslim Modernist movement (1840–1940), which categorically rejected classical criteria for both. As Charles Kurzman observes, the Modernists (who were unfailing supporters of parliamentary democracy) challenged ‘‘the authority of the past and the authority of the credential’’ and, despite a general lack of traditional training, claimed their right to per- form
ijtihad
, insisting in some cases that traditional scholastic education had become so sterile and far removed from modern realities that, instead of qualifying scholars for
ijtihad,
it actually disqualified them.
69

The Muslim Modernist movement suffered greatly with the rise of Western-oriented secular nationalism in the wake of World War II, but the debate over
ijtihad
has continued until the present, especially within the ranks of Activist thinkers, who, like the Modernists before them, generally lack traditional training, claim the prerogative of
ijtihad
for themselves, and reject the authority of classical tradition, often turning it upon its head. The decline of traditional religious authority over the past three centuries not only made radically different criteria for
bid‘a
and
ijtihad
possible but has also come to constitute one of the most critical cultural breaks in Islamic history.

As Richard Bulliet notes, the decline of classical authority in modern times was radically precipitated by the ubiquity of a periodical press and modern media coupled with national policies of universal education, which created mass readerships and heightened expectations: ‘‘The new technology enabled authors to become authorities simply by offering the reader persua- sive prose and challenging ideas.’’ Religious knowledge was removed from the scholastic classroom and pulpit, and various types of new religious authorities emerged who articulated their messages effectively in the language of the people and found large audiences. The classical moorings of
ijtihad
and Islamic thought came undone, and, as a consequence, the Muslim world fi s itself today ‘‘immersed in a crisis of [religious] authority,’’ the resolution of which is likely to take generations.
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The ‘‘new authorities’’ represent a diverse spectrum of intellectuals from liberal Modernists to radical Activists. Numbered among their ranks are the

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15

most influential Islamist ideologues of the twentieth century, whose claims to
ijtihad
have driven their agenda of creating a one-dimensional, politicized Islam. Most notable among them are Sayyid Qutb (Egypt, d. 1966), Abu A‘la Mawdudi (India/Pakistan, d. 1979), and ‘Ali Shari‘ati (Iran, d. 1977), and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (d. 1989). With the exception of Khomeini, all of these ‘‘new authorities’’ lacked classical training and adamantly rejected the relevance of traditional scholarship.
71
In recent years, Usama Bin Laden, an engineer, and his associate Ayman al-Zawahiri, a pediatrician, have emerged as the most notorious ‘‘new authorities’’ and frequently martial the accusation of
bid‘a
against their enemies and utilize their personal claim to
ijtihad
to justify ‘‘extremist positions.’’
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PRESENT AND FUTURE IMPLICATIONS

An authentic and sophisticated understanding of
bid‘a
as a control mecha- nism and
ijtihad
as an inducement for creativity is vital for Muslims today. Its greatest interpretative resource is the legacy of Islamic thought through the ages. Marshall Hodgson identifies Islam’s ‘‘great pre-Modern heritage’’ as, perhaps, the richest source Muslims possess in creating an integral vision of their religion’s place in the modern world but notes: ‘‘One of the problems of Muslims is that on the level of historical action their ties with relevant traditions are so tenuous.’’
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