Understanding Taqlid by Mufti Muhammad Sajaad

understanding taqlīd
has not learnt swimming trying to swim at sea. It will only lead to
his destruction.
The Shaikh also outlines in the preceding chapter what is required
for a person to be capable of deducing rulings from the sacred
texts, in other words the prerequisites of ijtihād. He records six
conditions, the first of which is the condition of encompassing all
the verses and ahadith on the subject. This would, at the very first
hurdle, lose most of us who have not learnt, let alone mastered,
the Arabic language. Translations can never convey the linguistic
intricacies, rhetorical devices and semantic nuances of the original
Arabic, and furthermore a vast number of the hadith collections
have yet to be translated into English.
juristic basis for taqlīd shakhṣī
alone being obligatory
It is important to elaborate in detail on what led to the change
in ruling from the permissibility of asking any of the scholars of
the four schools to following one school from the four exclusively.
As already stated, both kinds of taqlīd (non-specific of the four and
specific) equally shared the status of obligation for the layman. The
option was open to him to follow one school, as some did, and if
he was not particularly discerning as the average lay person is,
he simply asked any scholar he considered to be a reliable scholar
regardless of his school.
This first kind of taqlīd (ghayr shakhṣī) however produced a danger
which with the passing of time became more and more real. The
early Muslims were sincere in following the Dīn and their only
motivation in going to ask a scholar was to find out what his Dīn
said about that particular issue of concern to them. They were not
out to collect a portfolio of opinions and opt for what took their
fancy. Later, desires and whims came to be included in peoples’
motivation when asking. People would “shop” for opinions and
searched for anyone who would legitimise their desires.
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