Debates, Disagreements & Disunity: Who is a Mujtahid?

“We can't tell people to debate or not debate, but we can tell them when their word will matter and when it won't matter. And until you have proven yourself with the people of the field, it doesn't matter, and you can talk all you want.”

It can be concluded, with a high level of certainty and with little doubt, that the Muslim community has failed to replicate or maintain the rich intellectual history that facilitated the Islamic golden era. This intellectual descent means that the modern Muslim community has few, if any, mujtahids to whom they can turn to for the derivation of law based on and grounded within the primary textual sources.

Still, as Islamic intellectual history and thought becomes an increasing focus of academic exploration, the question of whether or not ‘the gates of ijtihad’ were in fact closed, or should remain closed if they were, has reappeared. In order to appreciate the gravity of such a question, it is first imperative to develop a holistic understanding of what it means to be someone capable of ijtihad - what does it mean to be a mujtahid?

To explore this question further, we spoke to Dr Shadee Elmasry:

MUHAMMAD JALAL:

I wonder whether we as modern Muslims living in so-called secular modernity underestimate what it means to do ijtihad and to be a mujtahid? My understanding is that only a mujtahid can derive an Islamic law. A mujtahid is responsible for deriving from the primary text and the Islamic opinions. And everyone else who may be brought under the umbrella of being a scholar, they are no more than echoing the opinions of those mujtahidin. And by in large, we live in an era where mujtahidin are in short supply whereas in Islamic history, mujtahidin seem to be not few and far between, especially in the golden era of Islam.

So, if that is the case, who is a mujtahid? How do we know whether a person who claims to have an Islamic opinion is qualified to derive from the primary text those opinions?

DR SHADEE ELMASRY:

There are two points I want to make here. The first is to ask you back: How do you know who can perform heart surgery on you?

MUHAMMAD JALAL:

I suppose they would have studied and are qualified. They would have a certificate authorising them to become a medic or surgeon.

DR SHADEE ELMASRY:

So, in a medical school, a student will study with 20-30 doctors. And if he passes, each one of them gives him a passing grade. And then the head of the school signs the document certifying that he has passed. But those doctors who passed him, who made them doctors? We can ask this question all the way back until Hippocrates himself. So, where did that start? That’s the question. 

So, that's the chainmail that I'm talking about of generations upon generations. And so, if you go back through our intellectual history there’s no diploma; there is no mujtahid diploma. But is that what makes a doctor? I could print one tomorrow. That's not what makes a doctor. What makes a doctor is the reality of multiple doctors who know him and who have seen his exams, who have seen his work as a resident. That's what matters. So even if you had 50 doctors and they brought some kid off the street and this guy spent 10 years with us. He’s never been to medical school, but he’s spent 10 years with us doing heart surgery. He can do the heart surgery. Is it going to change that he doesn't have that piece of paper? Or he has the reality of it in that he spent 10 years with us, and we all say and know that he can do surgery.

In the past, you had statements from scholars. For example, Imam Malik called the Syrian Imam Al-Uzaee an Imam, right. That's the signing off of one mujtahid to another. And so, we have this concept of thabaqat, which is biographies in which the scholars will speak about other scholars. It's called al-jarh wa ta’dil if you want to get into specifics. So, this is where scholars speak of other transmitters and they give their assessments and then you know the reader can see that. So, for example, you probably will never see anybody have anything bad to say about Imam Malik. Maybe some people that just have disagreements with them, but nobody will say he's not an imam. Nobody will say Imam Shafi is not an imam. Nobody will say Imam Ahmad is not an imam. So, that’s out.

The second point I want to make is there's a big misnomer and a misunderstanding that it's mujtahid or bust, that it's mujtahid or just an echoer, a transmitter. That’s actually false. There is something called mujtahid fin nazilah or mujtahid al-nazilah. This type of mujtahid is in the middle. He's not a mujtahid and he's not a follower either. But what does he have the right to do? He does have the right to take analogies from past conclusions. He's not going to go to the sources himself and develop a methodology, right, and rule upon a new issue. But he will make qiyas or analogy based upon the rulings of the past so that past ruling was given by a mujtahid imam from the Quran and Sunnah directly. And now the mujtahid fin nazilah takes that ruling and uses that as a primary source and applies it to a new matter. For example, these new meats that are made from the blood of a cow that you can then grow in a petri dish in a factory - who's going to make those conclusions? Someone, who is mujtahid fin nazilah.

Well, how do I know who is mujtahid fin nazilah? In the same way that you know who's mujtahid? This person does not come out of a vacuum, they don’t pop out of anywhere. He came from a school. He came from teachers. He came from circles. He has peers. And so, by looking around does anyone know him, yeah, we all know him, he's had a history for 25 years been studying, talking, and writing, and we know him. Then you can trust them. So, it's very similar to how Imam Ghazali talks about the mutawattir hadith. He says it’s very similar to how do you know that you’re satisfied? When you're eating food is there a measure, is there a moment that you know “I'm satisfied”, or is it a gradation that slowly comes into play? Likewise, the trust of a scholar. And so, you know after 2 years of being a student, you’re a good student, and the scholars say, “Yeah, he's a nice, good student.” After 5 years, now he teaches a TA. Now he's a teacher. Now, he's been on his own for 5 years. Now it's 20 years later.

So, you should know how that gradation grows. And then you know he's studying fatwa, how to get fatwa, how to become a mujtahid fin nazilah. And then the students say, “He’s studying and yeah he talks about it.” And then another 10 years past and all of a sudden now nobody doubts his conclusions. His own teachers go to him as a reference sometimes. That is the gradation like that of how trust develops.

MUHAMMAD JALAL:

We are mostly muqallidin. And I’m a muqallid. I follow a madhab, and I follow an opinion, and I tend to sort of live my life reading the book. Now I’m reading books and I'm trying to understand what my duty is in relation to Allah subhannallahu wa ta’ala. Some people will go one step further and they acquaint themselves with the evidences of a scholar. Does this person have a right to debate scholarly thought with others who have done a very similar thing?

For example, you may have a student who follows the school of Imam Malik and a student who follows the school of Imam Shafi. They’ve studied the evidences; they’ve acquainted themselves with evidences. Can they now engage in a full-on debate? What you often see is, on social media particularly, where people engage in these debates about different masaahil, different views and different issues not based on the fact that they are anywhere close to being a mujtahid or faqih or anything similar, but actually just because they’ve acquainted themselves with the evidences. Does that make sense?

DR SHADEE ELMASRY:

Yes. So, you basically have put it right. So, you have the mujtahid, the opposite end is the muqallid. You have two levels of grey in between. One notch up of the muqallid, according to Ibn Rushd, is the faqih, and the faqih is the advanced muqallid. He said most imams are just advanced. What is an advanced muqallid? Either that the person he knows a lot of the rulings or he knows a lot of the rulings and some, or many, or even all of the imam’s basis for the rulings. So, scholars today are going to be a faqih meaning they will either know the basis of the ruling, the evidence that the imam used, or they will simply know the ruling. You can benefit from both sides. Someone who speaks in public to the people in a wide range of a wider audience should be the type of faqih who knows the ruling and the evidence for the rulings. Instead of saying the Hanafi position is this and that’s it, someone may say can you explain, give me something else more that I could calm my heart. He said, oh you sure, this is the saying of Abdullah bin Mas’ud. So, the person, the common person says okay my heart feels good now that you gave me the evidence, right.

And then you have the other shade of grey, the lighter shade of grey, the mujtahid imanaazilah. He makes ijtihad based on the qiyas. So, the ruling of the madhab becomes a primary text. Now, the faqih and the students who know the evidences of their imams cannot really engage in a debate. They can engage all they want, but it's meaningless. Because in reality they still have not developed the understanding or the tools to understand why their imam that they're debating came up with those usul to begin with. And they could not at their level of understanding tell you why he came up with that and what would the responses be to that. So, because we lack that usuli capability, then comparing our apples and our oranges makes no sense.

MUHAMMAD JALAL:

Could you not be a muqallid and acquaint yourselves with the evidences, the usul of a scholar and debate both?

DR SHADEE ELMASRY:

You could. But you don't have the tools to have developed that on your own. At that point, if you did have that tool you would be a mujtahid imam. And then you could debate them. So, you don't understand how I came to this conclusion to begin with. Yes, you understand my formula, but do you understand how I came to concoct this formula? How I came to develop this formula, which is my usul? Can you debate me on that? No.

I'm sure that none of us can stand a chance to debate Imam Shafi on his usul. So, that's really where the ulama say: “Okay fine you studied his conclusion, you've studied his usul, can you develop a rival usul? So, develop it.” And they say, “Oh yeah I could!”. So, develop it, publish it, send it to the Islamic world. See what they tell you, right.

Suyuti did it and was closed down, in the sense that the scholars didn’t like it. They don't like it because we already have a nice, neat, four madhabs. We don't need a fifth one. And so, I would say go develop it. And they might shut you down, so we don't need a fifth madhab. But if the usuli scholar in the world, in all the languages, Urdu and Arabic and all the languages, will say, “Wow, I mean we don't need a fifth madhab, but this is the stuff, right. This is from the sources, it’s researched, there are no holes in this.” Then you can say, “Yes. Your word matters.”

We can't tell people to debate or not debate, but we can tell them when their word will matter and when it won't matter. And until you have proven yourself with the people of the field, it doesn't matter, and you can talk all you want.

This conversation is part of a podcast and has been edited for length, clarity and readability. You can listen to the entire podcast here and read a transcript here.