האם נסגרו שערי האג'תהאד?

תקציר

This article examines the “closure of the gates of ijtihad” in Islamic Jurisprudence. In contrast to prevalent views, the author of the article argues that ijtihad (the Islamic practice of producing innovative legal reasoning) has never ceased to exist. In the first 500 years of Islam, constituting an essential component of the science of Usul al-Fiqh, all schools of Islamic law regarded ijtihad as indispensable. As a result, groups or religious sects that objected were driven out of the Sunni community. Only at the beginning of the 6/12th century does the phrase “closure of the gates of ijtihad” appear in the literature, but jurists are not able to agree on its meaning because of conceptual ambiguity or uncertainty. Some jurists (mostly hanbalies) even objected to this concept all together. From the 10/16th century onward, the number of respected mujtahidin had gradually decreased, and the view of those (mostly hanefi) jurists who argued that the gates of ijtihad were closed gained prominence. Nevertheless, the author shows that jurists practiced under different names. The continuity of ijtihad throughout Islamic history, suggests that scholars should reexamine some of our conventional or established ideas about the stagnation of Islam in general and of Islamic law in particular.