The Teachings of Ibn Idrīs on Ijtihād

Now that we have seen the extent of the influence of Ibn ʿArabī on the jurisprudential thought and practice of Ibn Idrīs, we can better understand Ibn Idrīs’s teachings on ijtihād, scholarly authority and the schools of law. While many reform movements in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were influenced by growing European power or secular nationalism, a number of scholars have noted that Ibn Idrīs’s revivalism was influenced by neither. In the words of one scholar, it was the result of an ‘internal dynamic for change’, not a threat from the West, and as another noted, unlike modernist Salafism, it did not owe anything to European thought. In fact, both scholars characterised Ibn Idrīs as having completely ignored the West.

There was of course ample reason for Ibn Idrīs and his students to turn against madhhabism. Ibn Idrīs regularly spoke against the factionalism that resulted from fanatical devotion to the schools of law, whether in Mecca, Medina, or elsewhere. He described the followers of the schools as acting like different factions that accused each other of misguidance. In his study on Majdhūb, Albrecht Hofheinz described one incident that happened in Mecca in 1814, which was witnessed by Majdhūb and most likely by his teacher Ibn Idrīs, too. Ottoman troops retook Mecca from the house of Saʿūd, and the Ottomans attempted to re-establish their dominance by removing the Shāfiʿī judge and replacing him with a Ḥanafī one. This caused the locals to boycott the official Friday prayers and to petition for removal of the Ḥanafī judge, resulting in a deadlock that lasted for some time. Such incidents were but reminders of the divisions that school factionalism sometimes caused. Majdhūb, who had mastered the four schools of jurisprudence, himself wrote a treatise on ‘the need to transcend the divisions of the legal schools and to follow only the example of the Prophet’.

Madhhab factionalism as well as the influence of Ibn ʿArabī were equally contributing factors in shaping Ibn Idrīs’s stance on ijtihād.