| Ahl as Sunnah vs the "Salafi" Movement - Conditions of Ijtihad |  |  |  |
| Radd al Salafiyya - Refutations |
| Written by Al-Shaykh Jamil Effendi al-Siqdi al-Zahawi |
Conditions of Ijtihad
(1) He must be a master of the language of the Arabs, knowing its different dialects, the import of their poems, their proverbs, and their customs.ft1
(2) He must have a complete grasp of the differing opinions of the scholars and jurists of Islam.ft1
(3) He must be a jurist himself, learned in the Qur'an, having memorized it and knowing the difference of the seven readings of the Qur'an while understanding its commentary, being aware of what is clear and what is obscure in it, what it abrogates and what is abrogated by it, and the stories of the prophets.
(4) He must be learned in the Sunna of the Messenger of God, capable of distinguishing between its sound hadith and its weak hadith, its continuous hadith and hadith whose chain of transmission is broken, its chains of transmission, as well as those hadith which are well known.ft1
(5) He must be scrupulously pious in the religion, restraining his lower desires with respect to righteousness and trustworthiness, and his doctrine must be built upon the Qur'an and the Sunna of the Prophet. One who is missing in any of these characteristics falls short and is not permitted to be a Mujtahid whom people imitate.ft1
Ibn al-Qayyim in I`lam al-muwaqqi`in does not permit anyone to make derivation from the Qur'an and Sunna as long as he has not fulfilled the conditions of ijtihad with respect to the Islamic sciences. A man asked Ahmad Ibn Hanbal: "If a person memorized a hundred thousand hadiths, is he a jurist (faqih)?" Imam Ahmad said: "No." He said: "Two hundred thousand hadiths?" Imam Ahmad said: "No." Three hundred thousand hadiths? Again, he said: "No." "Four hundred thousand hadiths?" Finally, he said: "Yes."ft1 It is said that Ahmad Ibn Hanbal gave legal answers on the basis of six hundred thousand hadith.ft1
Know that people have agreed generation after generation and century after century that the Mujtahid Imams only derive legal rulings from the Qur'an and the Sunna after they have completely studied the Sunna and its sciences and the Qur'an with respect to its rulings and understanding, in a way unmatched by those who followed them in later times. On the contrary, the ulama, generation after generation, take hold of what they said , scholars of the caliber of al-Nawawi, al-Rafi`i, Taqi al-Din al-Subki, Ibn Hazm, Ibn Taymiyya, Ibn al-Qayyim, Ibn al-Jawzi, scholars like Fakhr al-Din al-Razi, al-Tahawi, al-Qasim, al-Qarafi: all were imitating the opinions of the Mujtahids and their followers, despite the fact that each one of these leading figures and those before them had delved deep into every category of the Islamic sciences. Yet and still, they knew that they had not arrived at the level of deriving law from Qur'an and Sunna independently. What's more, they understood their own limits. May God have mercy on the man who knows his measure and does not go beyond his proper level.
So how is it possible for any one of us from this later time to derive law from Qur'an and Sunna and to cast aside the ulama who were capable of deriving law and whom both the elite and the masses of the Muslims agree on following?
Ibn `Abd al-Wahhab's labeling disbeliever those who imitate the opinion of the Mujtahids of the past, as mentioned previously is only to initiate spread of his unwarranted innovation (bid`a) in our faith so that he may only considers Muslim those who follow him. Would that I knew what would happen if we supposed that past Mujtahids had gone astray, as Ibn `Abd al-Wahhab has claimed, and they had, indeed, gone astray. Would it be incumbent upon the common person to practice Islam while being unable to know how to derive legal rulings from Qur'an and Sunna with Ibn `Abd al-Wahhab having not yet been born to resolve the difficulty of their confusion and ignorance? I do not believe that he would have arrived at the temerity to say those people were living in the primordial state of natural religion (fitra) since they came in a time prior to a "renewer of religion"!ft1
The present writer knows that following an authority in matter of Islamic practice (al-taqlid) is necessary inasmuch as, ordinarily speaking, it is impossible that each individual Muslim reach the level of knowledge enabling him to derive legal rulings of the Shari`a directly from Qur'an when there is no plain meaning text and he is completely ignorant of the Arabic language like non-Arab people such as Persians, Kurd, Afghans, Turks, and others whose number increases beyond the number of Arabs, a fact obvious to any one with a knowledge of geography. The scholars of Islam have agreed that it is incumbent upon a person who has not reached the stage of ijtihad to follow and imitate the legal rulings of a mujtahid. For God has said: "Ask those who have knowledge (Ahl al-dhikr) if you do not know." (16: 43) and the Prophet said, on him be peace: "Did they ask when they did not know? For the only remedy of incapacity in such instances is to ask a question."
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