Muslim reformists, if I may call them that, like to make simple arguments. Failing that, some will attempt to redefine popular words and phrases, and take these redefined words and phrases as launchpads for their career. One of their most preposterous frauds is redefining the word taqlid.
Taqlid, in its strictest sense, means adhering to a legal tradition. By legal tradition, I refer to the four schools of law specifically, or the madhhabs (for an earlier discussion on this, see my post Get Thee Behind Me, Madhhab). If these Muslim reformists are to be believed, the very attitude of taqlid was the downfall of the Muslim umma (community). It bred complacency. It led to ossified understandings of religion and society. They look instead to a time when ijtihad (or independent interpretation of the sources of law) was freely practiced, and say that Muslims should abandon taqlid and return to that exciting time- the age of ijtihad. Any number of Muslim movements today agitate for the very same return. A lot of them, like al-Qaeda, are on terrorism watchlists, belong to a stream of Islam that condemns traditional orthodoxy and advocate what they believe to be a purer form of the religion.
Taqlid is not and has never been restricted to a period. Movements that push this historical narrative are perpetuating a fraud. Taqlid and ijtihad are closely linked, parts of a dialectical unity in the development of Islamic sacred law 1. The Mujtahid (practitioner of ijtihad) and Muqallid (practitioner of taqlid) are two natural sides of the mature legal framework that is Islamic law.
On both sides, there are duties. Someone who is unlearned must necessarily follow the opinion of one who is. He is a Muqallid by default. Whereas for a mujtahid, it is obligatory for him to strive after his own answers, based on the Quran and Sunna. This is part of the general duty of a scholar, who symbolizes the collective knowledge of the community he partakes in.
Islamic history is not divided into two sections. The fraud is in insisting that a golden age of ijtihad was then followed by a later and declining time of taqlid. In reality, both exist side by side. The central idea behind taqlid is not imitation, but authority. As Knut S Vikor explains, taqlid was a necessity if the free development of rules through ijtihad was to become a social reality in the practice of a school of law 2. Without taqlid, ijtihad holds no meaning. It becomes, in effect, an empty word. Ironically, such empty words suit Muslim reformists just fine.
Do you know of any other words that have been redefined into similar levels of meaningless-ness.
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Hi Shelia! One other interesting work discussing this issue is Sherman Jackson’s “Islamic Law and the State”. In it, he discusses how taqlid became a necessity – not because the ability to make ijtihad died out – but because the formation of schools or guilds of law meant that the methodology of the school was applied by hundreds (if not thousands!) of scholars to derive law, even law for previously unseen or unknown cases. Furthermore, that the issue of the madhhab became important because it was from the ranks of the madhahib that the qadi’s were drawn, and indeed, the judges relied upon the books of law from the various schools.
He sees ijtihad as continuing, but through the lens of takhrij – which meant either sifting through previous opinions and picking the most appropriate one, or developing a synthesis where applicable. This was done always in deference to the legal school and the communal edifice that these jurists and scholars worked within.