IJTIHAD

(Arabiceffort) in Islamic law, the independent or original interpretation of problems not precisely covered by the Qur'an, Hadith (traditions concerning the Prophet's life and utterances), and ijma' (scholarly consensus). In the early Muslim community every adequately qualified jurist had the right to exercise such original thinking, mainly ra'y (personal judgment) and qiyas (analogical reasoning), and those who did so were termed mujtahids. But with the crystallization of legal schools (madhabs) under the 'Abbasids (reigned 7501258), the Sunnites (the majority branch of Islam) held at the end of the 3rd century AH that the gates of ijtihad were closed and that no scholar could ever qualify again as mujtahid. All subsequent generations of jurists were considered bound to taqlid, the unquestioned acceptance of their great predecessors as authoritative and could, at most, issue legal opinions drawn from established precedents. The Shi'ites, the minority branch, never followed the Sunnites in this respect and still recognize their leading jurists as mujtahids, although in practice the Shi'ite law is little more flexible than that of the Sunnites. In Shi'ite Iran, the mujtahids act as guardians of the official doctrine, and in committee may veto any law that infringes on Islamic ordinances. Several prominent Sunnite scholars, such as Ibn Taymiah (12361328) and Jalal ad-Din as-Suyuti (14451505), dared to declare themselves mujtahids. In the 19th and 20th centuries reformist movements clamored for the reinstatement of ijtihad as a means of freeing Islam from harmful innovations (bid'ahs) accrued through the centuries and as a reform tool capable of adapting Islam to the requirements of life in a modern world.