Sources of Islam law + Ijitihad
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peace all
I just found this
"The first source of Islamic law is the Quran. The second is tradition (hadith). The third is consensus (ijima). The fourth is inference by analogy (Qiyas), and the fifth is exercise of judgement (ijitihad)."
From a book 'Animal Welfare in Islam' by Al-Hafiz Basheer Ahmad Masri.
Can I ask how those who don't follow hadith would view this?
The author of the book is Sunni. I actually read somewhere that Sunni's don't practice ijitihad, that's it more a Shia thing, which is a little confusing.
Also, I have been told recently not to make up 'fatwas' by making my own decisions on things ( -) so I'm wondering in making your own decisions - by following Quran and using the amazing brains we've been given - are we practicing ijitihad? Or am I confused as to it's meaning?
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First, second, third... How can you get something out the hoboured Qur'an if you do not use your own judgement. Own judgement is not the last thin, but the thing tht is everywhere, and when somebody tells you that you are using your ego, it goes nowhere, because ANYBODY who gives an opinion, whether consulting a thousand books and being acknowledged as a doctor in it(fatwa) or consulting only two or three or four people or nobody, all are using their own judgement. That is plain. Then, to judge which "own judgement" one is going to follow, whether of the ulema A or Z, one also uses his or her own judgement. To proceed from the premisa tht those who pose as knowlegeable have better judgement than other people, is wild guessing. In times past, I don't know. Today, it is manifestly wrong.
No matter how many hadith of how many consensus or inferences you may make, if womething is devoid of common sense, it is useless and more thna useless harmful.
Today's society is not ready for swallowing anything just because somebody supposedly erudit says so, it must make sense and be confronted as against facts. That is what the Qur'an invites us to do. Not to believe anything as idiots, but to go through it, reflect and experience.
Salaam
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peace,
"The first source of Islamic law is the Quran. The second is tradition (hadith). The third is consensus (ijima). The fourth is inference by analogy (Qiyas), and the fifth is exercise of judgement (ijitihad)."
From a book 'Animal Welfare in Islam' by Al-Hafiz Basheer Ahmad Masri.
This is commonly stated, but it is often lip service. It is quite common for Traditional commentators to over-rule former with the latter. There is no consistency. There are many examples of this in the books under "Islamic History and Law" here
http//islam-and-muslims.com/islamic-books-online.htmlPersonally, I'd love to see any in-depth Traditional study of The Quran or Islamic history that was consistent in methodology. I've never came across such a work. If anyone knows of any, let me know.
In part, this is one of the things that underpins the Traditional position, because it doesn't matter if someone proves an inconsistency or contradiction in their view, because since they have no consistent method, they pick and choose quite happily, and/or they make up some convoluted exceptions to the rule reasoning. For students of The Quran, we have no such "luxury", we can only go by its consistency . -
Peace
The ordering is based on Shafi AFAIK. Ijma and Raye (opinion) took preference over hadith, it was later that qiyas took place. Ijtihad was at head..
I think there is nothing wrong with consensus provided it's well.. just. people live in democracy right?
qiyas is just a glorified way of comparison kinda reminds me of WWJD except remove the J and add the sunnah. Ijtihad unfortunately seems to be locked down in the past.
The author of the book is Sunni. I actually read somewhere that Sunni's don't practice ijitihad, that's it more a Shia thing, which is a little confusing.
sunnis say ijtihad doors are closed, however many sunnis believe it should be opened or to say it is closed is an innovation because its a duty for every muslim. however formally its considered "closed" but not exactly closed. closed in the sense of we're laymen we can't make judgement but the people with knowledge do..
shia's claim to go on their own ijtihad but they're bound by their marja'3s which is basically the creed they subscribe to until Mahdi comes. Ijtihad is a muslim thing, all muslims believe it. Ijtihads meaning is to struggle, to fight the struggle, to strive. getting an education is considered an ijtihad, raising righteous children is also etc.
by following Quran and using the amazing brains we've been given - are we practicing ijitihad? Or am I confused as to it's meaning?
well kind of just depends if your amazing brain decides to follow it's own hawa or not. how do you judge the difference between desire/want and justice/logic?
fatwa and ijtihad are different things, however it is through "ijtihad" that certain sheikhs make fatwas
hope i make sense
peace.
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Peace
The ordering is based on Shafi AFAIK. Ijma and Raye (opinion) took preference over hadith, it was later that qiyas took place. Ijtihad was at head..
I think there is nothing wrong with consensus provided it's well.. just. people live in democracy right?
qiyas is just a glorified way of comparison kinda reminds me of WWJD except remove the J and add the sunnah. Ijtihad unfortunately seems to be locked down in the past.
sunnis say ijtihad doors are closed, however many sunnis believe it should be opened or to say it is closed is an innovation because its a duty for every muslim. however formally its considered "closed" but not exactly closed. closed in the sense of we're laymen we can't make judgement but the people with knowledge do..
shia's claim to go on their own ijtihad but they're bound by their marja'3s which is basically the creed they subscribe to until Mahdi comes. Ijtihad is a muslim thing, all muslims believe it. Ijtihads meaning is to struggle, to fight the struggle, to strive. getting an education is considered an ijtihad, raising righteous children is also etc.
well kind of just depends if your amazing brain decides to follow it's own hawa or not. how do you judge the difference between desire/want and justice/logic?
fatwa and ijtihad are different things, however it is through "ijtihad" that certain sheikhs make fatwas
hope i make sense
peace.
Yes Sarah that was great - thank you!! ) It's interesting to hear about the Sunni - Shia thing. Islam certainly is complicated to learn about. It shouldn't be this complicated, but it is.
Can I just ask when you said "Ijtihad was at head" - do you mean that at one time it was considered the most important way of coming to a decision?
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How can you get something out the hoboured Qur'an if you do not use your own judgement. Own judgement is not the last thin, but the thing tht is everywhere, and when somebody tells you that you are using your ego, it goes nowhere, because ANYBODY who gives an opinion, whether consulting a thousand books and being acknowledged as a doctor in it(fatwa) or consulting only two or three or four people or nobody, all are using their own judgement. That is plain. Then, to judge which "own judgement" one is going to follow, whether of the ulema A or Z, one also uses his or her own judgement. To proceed from the premisa tht those who pose as knowlegeable have better judgement than other people, is wild guessing. In times past, I don't know. Today, it is manifestly wrong.
Excellent point Huruf. We do use our own judegment no matter what we do. I hadn't really thought of it the way you put it.
No matter how many hadith of how many consensus or inferences you may make, if womething is devoid of common sense, it is useless and more thna useless harmful.
peace
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peace,
This is commonly stated, but it is often lip service. It is quite common for Traditional commentators to over-rule former with the latter. There is no consistency. There are many examples of this in the books under "Islamic History and Law" here
http//islam-and-muslims.com/islamic-books-online.htmlPersonally, I'd love to see any in-depth Traditional study of The Quran or Islamic history that was consistent in methodology. I've never came across such a work. If anyone knows of any, let me know.
In part, this is one of the things that underpins the Traditional position, because it doesn't matter if someone proves an inconsistency or contradiction in their view, because since they have no consistent method, they pick and choose quite happily, and/or they make up some convoluted exceptions to the rule reasoning. For students of The Quran, we have no such "luxury", we can only go by its consistency .I think with using The Quran only there are still inconsistencies or different conclusions being arrived at. But we lack the wholesale confusion that enters when hadith is in the picture. I can remember feeling really overwhelmed by Islam at times because there was always some other dua or thing I should or shouldn't do...when I still wasn't doing most of the others that I'd heard you should. This religion was supposed to be easy for us and from the moment I converted it was never easy...always too much conflict & too much confusion. But of course by doing as God intended and using The Quran as the guide we avoid much of that. In fact that could be seen as the luxury
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Yes Sarah that was great - thank you!! ) It's interesting to hear about the Sunni - Shia thing. Islam certainly is complicated to learn about. It shouldn't be this complicated, but it is.
Can I just ask when you said "Ijtihad was at head" - do you mean that at one time it was considered the most important way of coming to a decision?
np. I dont mean it was the most important thing but rather it was valued much more and expected and sought out.
Ijma happened a lot afaik which is based on peoples/scholars opinions who reflected their ijtihad in the ijma/discussion.
certain things overlap..
you gotta understand, how can you have a consensus without an argument? the argument would be for or against, and the "for" or "against" would be based on the ijtihad they executed.
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np. I dont mean it was the most important thing but rather it was valued much more and expected and sought out.
Ijma happened a lot afaik which is based on peoples/scholars opinions who reflected their ijtihad in the ijma/discussion.
certain things overlap..
you gotta understand, hw can you have a consensus without an argument? the argument would be for or against, and the "for" or "against" would be based on the ijtihad they executed.
Salaam. Ok, thanks. Yes I can see you do need to make some decision not matter what. Like Huruf said even if you are deciding which sheik to follow.
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at the end, i will have to stand in front God and be judged for how i lived my life. i am not sure how it will go down for me to say to God, well....you know, i went with the hadith, ijima, etc instead of using my judgement.
i wonder why God even bothered with the Koran when we have hadiths, ijima, and other sources.
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at the end, i will have to stand in front God and be judged for how i lived my life. i am not sure how it will go down for me to say to God, well....you know, i went with the hadith, ijima, etc instead of using my judgement.
i wonder why God even bothered with the Koran when we have hadiths, ijima, and other sources.
Oh I LOVE the way you put that!!! I think it would feel strange and you would surely realise your mistake when you had to say those words. To have in a sense forsaken the real message contained in Quran as well as ignored commone sense and your own judegment and what for? "I did it because someone said I must follow hadith and because the scholars know more about this that I do" ??? Thanks.
sun -
the Qur'an was not written to be complicated. any authority that claims this is first in error, and second has their own ego as a motivating force. the idea that they should have the right to impose their personal meaning associated with their ego on any law that is imposed on the rest of a community, simply because they are experts on the Qur'an is one of the many places where Shaitan inserted his ugly head into the trappings of Islam. i say trappings because they are what people see initially when they think of Islam. however, this is is so widely different from community to community, not only in different countries, but sometimes even different regions within a country, that the inconsistencies are glaring.
now of course we cant be worried about people in other nations, or what they practice with regards to applying their spin on the Qur'an into their Islamic laws, but we can determine in free nations what unjust laws we do or don't adhere to in our own respective countries.
the final authority on what is or is not adhered to is the holy words of Allah in the Qur'an. no injecting of our own egos or opinions. there is no contradiction in the Qur'an, what is often seen as contradiction is just a record of progression, for instance the progression of the use of Alcohol, which is first only prohibited during prayer and then completely forbidden later. this was Gods way of saying "wean yourself off", he allows for personal growth at your own pace. its not a race. Allah is most merciful and just. however it is not an excuse to continue once you know the truth.
the thing about Hadith is that often times instead of having anything to do with the principles of the Qur'an, they are either stories for historical reference, or they are down right vulgar and repulsive stories that are the equivalent to ten year old's misbehaving in church or telling dirty jokes on the playground. in many instances you might have a lot of stories attributed to an author that sound great, but then another that is attributed to the same author is vulgar or nonsensical. this leads me to question the validity of any of them. and i wonder why do some of these Imam, scholars, and sheiks still insist on clinging to these Hadith if they are obviously not of Allah? the solution to this problem is to filter every Hadith through the wisdom of the Qur'an and then discard any that disagree with it. then only those that are left must be matched up to historical record and the few that remain should only be used for historical reference, not support of the Qur'an. the Qur'an needs no support or interpretation (other than interpretation of the meanings of Arabic words and their beautiful multiple meanings.) i have often heard people say that the purpose of Hadith is to support the Qur'an. this is blasphemy. God does not need our consent to speak. what he said is all that needs to be said, he doesn't need some 3rd or 4th century scholars opinion to back him up. however God is merciful. he could have stricken these innovators down on the spot, but instead he allowed it to show all of us how easily our own egos can be injected into the teachings of his people.
for those sheiks who see this as a huge problem, and one of the many reasons that Islam is divided, they have rightly inferred that these divisions are exactly what Allah forbid when he warned against causing Fitnah. to claim one or the other sect is better than the other simply because of interpretations of a man or a few men which has been filtered through their ego is Fitnah.
those of us who are trying to redirect our brothers and sisters to the Qur'an as the final authority and words of our creator are not guilty of Fitnah as these dividers claim, but rather we are restorers. so the best solution is not to find the group you best fit into but rather worry about whether or not you are following God's prescription for life as written in the Qur'an. therefore the best way to identify yourself is not to claim Sunni, or Shia, or any other subgroup, but to simply say "i am a Muslim". is complete submission to God not enough?
any other submission to anything else is a form of idolatry. so submission to the man made laws based off of some scholars convoluted opinion which is saturated in his own ego and fueled by the foolishness of others worshiping him at the time, is completely against the will of the creator.
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I think all the problem arises from the concept of authority and who formulates laws and how should those laws be.
I think that the need or desire to organize as specifically a political entity as followers of a religion, or rather, with the followers of a religion as the constituents of that society, led to the the overriding compulsion to extract laws off the Qur'an by hook or crook. The Qur'an contains very few if at all laws that can be taken just like that and make a complete legal system. Which is very logical if we, right after the fatiha which guide us to the upright, straight path... We come immediately to the beginning of Al baqara This book, there is no doubt in it, A GUIDE for the conscious...
It is a guide, not a code of laws. The laws that may be extracted out of the Qur'an re but an illustration of what conditions should satisfy any law passed by muslims. It is self-defeating to pretend on applying a law supposedly extracted from the Qur'an and then claim that no matter what, we cannot depart from the Qur'an, when the first conditions is that it should satisfy justice and equity. Also, even for that the Qur'an contains very few injunctions that could be construed into laws, so there came the hadiths to obviate the need for muslims of that time to think throughly and come up with laws that could satisfy the conditions imposed by Qur'an, or rather, th interest, political or economical of the time already determined how should those laws be and therefore what kind of hadiths were needed. Since interests run in many directions, but mostly always against women and common people, hadiths came to supply what the Qur'n did not. The loop, by giving to the Qur'an the twist need to fit the hadiths, closed conveniently.
Of course, since not all people in all ages and circumstances is completely devoid of sense of justice, there were in turn twists and hadiths to assuage the inequities instlled in first place, a few centuries and disdain for thought an reflection and personal responsibility, took muslim societies where we are now.
We seem to cringe to the thought that we must deal with the problems, that there is no magical recipe in the Qur'an or anywhere to take those problems away from us. That WE ARE ADDRESSED by the Qur'an to shoulder responsibility and dare act on th Qur'an with our juddgement and faithfulness. Adn we still try and try to have the Qur'an tell us what it does not say, because God did not want to give us rcipe, but remind us and guide us. not solve directly the problems that He put us here to solve. And which we may never solve, but which we must try, because jihad is our way of living, struggle, always struggle to go beyond, to overcome constantly our limits, so that we can get to ayum addin and say I did try and struggled all my life to get nearer and nearer to your staisfaction. I did my best. The result of our struggle we may see in this world or we may not, but it is sure that we will see it in the next. Those who fall in the struggle in this world, will get that for which they struggled. We must believe. It is true, our efforts will not be wasted nor in vain. But we must struggle and make an effort, we must not be like lumpen expecting always to have our food handed to us already chewed.
Salaam
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this is exactly the point. the Qur'an was never meant to be an exact formula or magic words that excuse us from thinking or acting as we should. many misunderstand this. it is human nature to want everything to be predictable, hard, and sure. but in the unsure world we live in we must not ignore personal responsibility. it is fair to say that these rulers did not want to exercise their brains in solving disputes, and sought a cure all for every problem that they got tired of trying to reconcile. often times they did twist the words of the Qur'an to justify their injustices, or make things easier therefore absolving anyone exercising those laws from either conscience or levity.
one example is how Hammurabi's code made it into Sharia law. in the Qur'an it says to cut the hand, not cut it off, if a man steals something. this was to mark them so others would know. if such a man came to your fruit stand, he would be marked and it was the signal for you to watch him carefully so he didn't steal from you, but since marking the hand did not hinder him from work, it then encouraged him to do better instead of steal. if his hand was chopped off, this would make it more likely he would either beg or steal. so they created more problems by twisting the Qur'an to serve their laziness.
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Why would Allah give us a powerful brain if we were supposed not to use it? Ijitihad is important since it allows us to grow close to Allah. It allows us to understand what Allah wants from us. It allows us to be what he wants us to be. We cannot be in a state of islam if we don't use Ijitihad. Yes we will be in submission. Not in submission to Allah, submission to those who tell us we can't use Ijitihad.
Think for yourselves and grow close to Allah.
Just my thoughts.
JewishDude
peace Salam, Shalom, Peace peace
