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Two of the most important components of Islam that make it a mobile idea are the concepts of bidʻa (innovation) and ijtihad (critical legal thinking in search for answers to new problems). Close attention to bidʻa and ijtihad gives Islam great historical mobility, enabling it to preserve continuity with the past while renewing its vitality as a dynamic faith.
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A feel for the true conceptions of bidʻa and ijtihad is necessary for Muslims today. Both concepts are central to how we conceive of ourselves as Muslims, the types of practices we condone, and the future we envision. The health of a Muslim community is tied to the sophistication and functional religious literacy of its members. Sherman Jackson emphasizes the necessity of promoting the intellectual health of the Muslim community by spreading "Islamic literacy"...
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Islamic literacy is required by the rules of ijtihad, which were never restricted to scholars alone but required the lay community to pass judgment on each scholar's aptitude. A sound understanding of bidʻa and ijtihad is a fundamental component of the Islamic literacy our community needs....
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Given bidʻa's shades of meaning, classical Islamic jurisprudence evaluated it according to the five ethical categories of the religious law: obligatory, recommended, neutral, disliked, and forbidden. Thus, the gamut ran from obligatory bidʻa to forbidden. Acceptable types of bidʻa were ranked as obligatory, recommended, or neutral. Types of bidʻa that violated the established precepts and principles of the law were classified as forbidden or disliked, according to the degree of harm.
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Ibn Hajar wrote: "Put precisely, if a bidʻa comes under the rubric of things regarded as good in the law, it is good. If it comes under the rubric of things ill-regarded in the law, it is ill-regarded. Otherwise, it belongs to the category of neutral things. Thus, [in general] [bidʻa] may be divided into the five [ethical] divisions."
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As ijtihad is a standing obligation, to neglect it was cause for censure. The renowned Sunni jurist al-Qarafi asserted that there was scholarly consensus (ijmaʻ) on harshly reprimanding religious scholars who handed down legal judgments mechanically without performing ijtihad and merely followed the ancient texts in their books literally without regard for new realities on the ground.
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Ibn Qayyim said about al-Qarafi: This is pure understanding of the law. Whoever issues legal rulings to the people merely on the basis of what is transmitted in the compendia despite differences in their customs, usages, times, places, conditions, and the special circumstances of their situations has gone astray and leads others astray. His crime against the religion is greater than the crime of a physician who gives people medical prescriptions without regard to the differences of their climes, norms, the times they live in, and their physical conditions but merely in accordance with what he finds written down in some medical manual about people with similar anatomies. Such a person is an ignorant physician; the other is an ignorant legal scholar but more detrimental.
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Undoubtedly, many traditional jurists not only failed to live up to the standards of al-Qarafi and Ibn Qayyim but also demonstrated an exasperating lack of creativity, stifling its spirit in others. Their rigidity created the widespread impression among Muslims and Westerners alike (including a surprising number of present-day academics and writers of good standing) that the door of ijtihad was "closed" hundreds of years ago as a matter of religious principle.
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The conspicuous decline of ijtihad at certain periods of Islamic history reflected a general social and intellectual malaise, not legal or theological doctrine. In fact, there is little historical evidence that the door of ijtihad was ever closed. Further, since Islam never had anything comparable to a church hierarchy, the "door of ijtihad" never had a doorkeeper to close it in the first place.
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The question of who was qualified to perform ijtihad was not posed by the Prophet but by later scholars. Their stipulations typically required that a person performing ijtihad be an upright Muslim of sound mind with full command of the Arabic language and mastery of the core disciplines of Islamic learning, including knowledge of the Qurʼan and sunna, consensus, methods of legal reasoning, and the overriding objectives of the law.
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Their [scholars] control over ijtihad was first systematically called into question during the pivotal eighteenth century-the eve of modernity in the Muslim world-when various Sunni and Shiʻi revivalists demanded less stringent criteria.
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Generally, revisionists in both camps favored literalist interpretations that were easy for the common people to grasp. A similar emphasis on literalism later became characteristic of Muslim Activist (fundamentalist) intellectuals in the twentieth century.
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The conceptualization of ijtihad underwent even more radical change after the full onslaught of colonial rule and Western modernity in the nineteenth century. New approaches to education and ijtihad became primary concerns for the Muslim Modernist movement (1840-1940), which categorically rejected classical criteria for both. As Charles Kurzman observes, the Modernists (who were strong supporters of parliamentary democracy) challenged "the authority of the past and the authority of the credential" and, despite a general lack of traditional training, claimed their right to perform ijtihad, insisting in some cases that traditional Islamic education had become so sterile and so far removed from modern realities that, instead of qualifying scholars for ijtihad, it actually disqualified them.
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It is vital for Muslims today to have an authentic and sophisticated understanding of bidʻa as a regulatory mechanism and of ijtihad as a process for inducing Islamic creativity...
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