Ijma

Ijmāʿ (إجماع), literally "agreement" or "consensus," denotes the unanimous concurrence of the qualified jurists (mujtahidūn) of the Muslim community in a given generation upon a ruling of Islamic law. Classical uṣūl al-fiqh (jurisprudential theory) ranks it as the third source of the Sharīʿah after the Qurʾān and the Sunnah, and ahead of qiyās (analogical reasoning). Its principal textual sanction is derived from the Qurʾānic verse 4:115, which warns against following a path other than that of the believers, and from the prophetic tradition reported by al-Tirmidhī and Ibn Mājah, "My community will not agree upon an error" (lā tajtamiʿu ummatī ʿalā ḍalāla). Theorists such as al-Shāfiʿī (d. 820), whose al-Risāla first systematised the sources, al-Ghazālī in al-Mustaṣfā, and al-Āmidī in al-Iḥkām, treated ijmāʿ as conferring certainty (qaṭʿī) once established, rendering its rulings binding and not subject to reopening by later generations.

The mechanism requires that all mujtahidūn living in a single epoch reach agreement on a legal question; the consensus may be express (ṣarīḥ), where each jurist openly states his opinion, or tacit/silent (sukūtī), where some pronounce a view and the rest remain silent without dissent. Jurists distinguished the consensus of the Companions (ijmāʿ al-ṣaḥāba), regarded as the strongest, from later consensus. The schools differed sharply on scope: the Mālikīs privileged the practice of the people of Medina (ʿamal ahl al-Madīna), while certain Shīʿī traditions admitted the consensus only when it disclosed the opinion of the infallible Imām. Critics such as al-Naẓẓām of the Muʿtazila and, in modern times, reformers, questioned whether universal agreement across the entire Muslim world could ever be empirically verified, treating most claimed ijmāʿ as historically the consensus of a school rather than the whole community.

Concrete instances of ijmāʿ include the compilation of the Qurʾān into a single muṣḥaf under Caliph ʿUthmān, the agreement on twenty rakʿas of tarāwīḥ instituted under ʿUmar, the prohibition of marriage to one's grandmother by analogy extended through consensus, and the validity of the office of the caliphate itself. In the contemporary period (2026), collective ijtihād exercised through bodies such as the Islamic Fiqh Academy (Majmaʿ al-Fiqh al-Islāmī) of the OIC in Jeddah and the European Council for Fatwa and Research is frequently presented as a modern institutional analogue of ijmāʿ for novel issues like organ transplantation, banking and bioethics, though purists dispute that such resolutions carry classical binding force.

For the CSS Islamic Studies paper, Ijmāʿ is a recurring topic under "Sources of Islamic Law." Examiners typically ask candidates to define it, establish its Qurʾānic and Sunnah basis, classify its types (ṣarīḥ and sukūtī), distinguish the positions of the Sunnī schools and the Shīʿa, and assess its relevance to modern legislation and ijtihād. A strong answer cites al-Shāfiʿī's al-Risāla, the ummatī ḥadīth, and a dated example such as the ʿUthmānic codification, while noting the practical difficulty of verifying universal consensus.