Islam and the modern world: ijtihad & reform
CSS Islamic Studies lesson on ijtihad, the closing of its gate, and modern reform movements from Shah Wali Allah to Iqbal and contemporary fiqh councils.
What ijtihad is, and its sources
Ijtihad (from j-h-d, to exert effort) is the exercise of independent juristic reasoning to derive a ruling (hukm) where the Qur'an and Sunnah are silent or ambiguous. Its classical instruments are qiyas (analogical deduction), ijma (consensus), istihsan (juristic preference, favoured by the Hanafis), istislah / maslaha mursala (unregulated public interest, developed by Imam Malik and systematised by al-Shatibi in al-Muwafaqat, d. 1388), and urf (custom). The textual warrant is the hadith of Mu'adh ibn Jabal, dispatched to Yemen by the Prophet, who pledged to judge by the Qur'an, then the Sunnah, then ajtahidu ra'yi (I will exert my own reasoning).
The maqasid framework
Reformist ijtihad rests heavily on maqasid al-shari'a — the higher objectives of the law. Al-Ghazali (d. 1111) in al-Mustasfa enumerated five necessities (daruriyyat) the Shari'a exists to protect: religion (din), life (nafs), intellect (aql), lineage (nasl), and property (mal). Al-Shatibi elevated maqasid into a complete theory, ranking interests as daruriyyat, hajiyyat (needs), and tahsiniyyat (embellishments). Modern reformers — Rashid Rida, Ibn Ashur in Maqasid al-Shari'a al-Islamiyya (1946), and Yusuf al-Qaradawi — argue that fidelity to these objectives, not literalist replication of medieval rulings, is the authentic method for new questions: organ transplantation, banking, bioethics.
The 'closing of the gate'
The oft-cited thesis that bab al-ijtihad (the gate of ijtihad) closed around the 4th/10th century — after the four Sunni schools (Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi'i, Hanbali) crystallised — is contested. Joseph Schacht popularised the 'closure' claim; Wael Hallaq's 1984 article Was the Gate of Ijtihad Closed? demonstrated that mujtahids continued operating throughout. What did harden was taqlid (imitation of an established school) as the default for ordinary jurists. The reform impulse of the 18th–20th centuries was, in essence, a summons to reopen ijtihad against unreflective taqlid — a debate a CSS candidate must be able to state on both sides.