Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

182 t CHAPTER SEVEN
was now bound to follow the teachings of the jurists of the classical
schools of the classical era.
The “closure of the gate of ijtihad” has an ominous ring to it,
but should be understood in a sense not very different from the
closure of the Talmud. As a herald for the advent of scholasticism,
scholars had to couch their legal speculations in the form of commentary
and explication on an established body of masters, in this
case the developed doctrine of the canonical schools. The analogy
with the Talmud should not be pressed too closely, however. In a
sense Islamic law was fundamentally in place by the beginning of
the tenth century, just as the Mishnah was complete in the third,
and the two Talmuds in the sixth. But all these latter were formal
texts, whereas the sharia continued to exist, even after the tenth
century, in the form of a somewhat inchoate, if consensually
agreed on, mass of propositions whose exact formulation had only
as much authority as the jurisprudent from whose pen it came.
One lawyer who attempted to pry open the gate of ijtihad—and
successfully in the eyes of some increasingly influential modern
Muslims—was Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328). This Syrian jurist belonged
to the Hanbali school, the most conservative of the Islamic
legal traditions. The Hanbalis resisted “innovation” on all fronts,
and yet they were uneasy with the notion of the closure of the gate
of ijtihad. It was not so much because they favored the sometimes
dangerous personal effort but rather because they doubted the
possibility of any real consensus of scholars. Consensus was, as we
have seen, the validating principle of ijtihad but many Hanbalis
thought of consensus as a literal majority of all of the ulama,
which was unlikely in the best of circumstances. Thus, the door of
ijtihad still remained theoretically ajar for Ibn Taymiyya, the most
prestigious of the Hanbali jurists.
Note: Today the gate of ijtihad seems agape rather than merely ajar.
Early in the nineteenth century, some of Islam’s progressive intellectuals
used the Hanbali arguments about the impossibility of a consensus
to assert their own right to practice ijtihad to modernize Islamic
practice. The argument and its conclusion also proved useful to