Reply to Zia Sardar
Last week in the New Statesman they had Ziauddin Sardar, a darling of the British liberal media, spouting some of his well-known ideas. I am quite interested in Sardar because it was one of his books, now known as Introducing Islam, which was instrumental in influencing me to accept Islam. Nevertheless, the ideas put forward in his article in the NS last week, and in Introducing Islam, are just plain wrong, and worse, they are presented as fact and as widely-held opinion. They are, in fact, the opinions of a small intellectual group.
Sardar’s thesis is that, around the 14th century, Muslim scholars who were concerned about threats to their influence over Muslim society “closed the gates of ijtihad”, in other words, banned fresh reasoning on religious issues. (Ijtihad means striving; it means personally exerting oneself to find answers to religious questions. It implies honesty, not judging by one’s desires or opinions.) He alleges that it was replaced with taqlid, which he falsely translates as “blind imitation” when it actually means following qualified scholarship – in fact, most of the Salaf were people of taqlid as are most of those who criticise the practice today.
He complains that this resulted in an intellectual degeneration, and was a major reason for the ease with which the Muslims were later colonised. Sardar advocates the re-opening of the “gates of ijtihad” and misrepresents the reason, and extent, to which they have been closed. The gates of ijtihad on new issues, such as the Islamic response to newly-available medical procedures, has never been closed, but ijtihad is restricted to qualified people. It takes years to reach the standard of knowledge necessary to make genuine ijtihad. A contemporary scholar (an American convert who studied for decades in Jordan and Syria) told a gathering I attended that he met many people who compared themselves to the early imams of ijtihad, and none of them could even properly recite the Fatiha, the short opening chapter of the Qur’an, properly, which Muslims are expected to recite at least seventeen times every day!
The issues on which the gates are closed are old issues, such as the particulars of worship and purification, which were settled in the first few hundred years of Islam by far better qualified people than are available today. Those that wish to open them today are in many cases reactionary Wahhabis, and their propaganda has caused much discord in the modern Muslim community. On top of this, the classical education in the four schools of thought is what stands to put the Muslim community back on its famous “Middle Path” and steer it away
from extremism. To quote Abdul-Hakim Murad, “with every Muslim now a proud mujtahid, and with taqlid dismissed as a sin rather than a humble and necessary virtue, the divergent views which caused such pain in our early history will surely break surface again. Instead of four madhhabs in harmony, we will have a billion madhhabs in bitter and self-righteous conflict. No more brilliant scheme for the destruction of Islam could ever have been devised” (Understanding the Four Madhhabs: the Problem of Anti-Madhhabism).
