Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: The Sufis and Legal Theory
- Part 1 Mysticism, Traditionalism and the School of Mercy
- Part 2 Mercy in Flexibility: A Path for All Mankind
- Part 3 The Akbarī Madhhab in Practice and its Influence on the Modern World
- Conclusion: The Spirit of the Law – Competing Visions
- Appendix: The Classical Juristic Debate on Whether Every Mujtahid was Correct
- References
- Index
9 - Aḥmad ibn Idrīs and the Implementation of Ibn ʿArabī’s Jurisprudence in the Nineteenth Century
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 August 2023
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: The Sufis and Legal Theory
- Part 1 Mysticism, Traditionalism and the School of Mercy
- Part 2 Mercy in Flexibility: A Path for All Mankind
- Part 3 The Akbarī Madhhab in Practice and its Influence on the Modern World
- Conclusion: The Spirit of the Law – Competing Visions
- Appendix: The Classical Juristic Debate on Whether Every Mujtahid was Correct
- References
- Index
Summary
It is difficult to know how many Sufis and scholars followed the jurisprudential thought of Ibn ʿArabī when it came to their own private worship, regardless of the school with which they may have officially been affiliated. It was not uncommon throughout Muslim history for scholars to take official positions as judges or muftīs in one school, due to state sponsorship or other reasons, even though their own personal convictions and private worship accorded to another. In the nineteenth century, however, we have a remarkable phenomenon: the jurisprudential thought of Ibn ʿArabī was implemented and followed on a large scale by the different Sufi ṭuruq and scholars that constituted the Idrīsī tradition. It was perhaps the first time that the madhhab of Ibn ʿArabī, as a set of principles of jurisprudence and positive law, came ‘alive’ as a school (beside perhaps the circle of Ibn ʿArabī’s immediate disciples). So far, however, all scholarship has attributed these teachings to the direct ijtihād of the eponymous founder of the Idrīsī tradition, Aḥmad ibn Idrīs (d. 1837), and overlooked the influence of Ibn ʿArabī. This is because Ibn Idrīs was a highly accomplished scholar, a master of Islamic disciplines such as ḥadīth and Qurʾānic exegesis, who proclaimed himself to be a fully independent mujtahid. Ibn Idrīs was also treated as an inspired authority by his students and did not feel the need to cite any previous authorities. Ibn Idrīs’s biographer O’Fahey wrote:
What is striking is how rarely he ever cites any previous authorities. In his lectures, Ibn Idrīs interprets the Qurʾān and sunna ‘straight’ on his own authority. For him, ijtihād was a real and living process, not an abstract ideal […] Thus, Ibn Idrīs seems not only to have claimed the right to and to have exercised absolute (muṭlaq) ijtihād, but to have deliberately defied the sad judgement of Ibn Khaldūn, ‘The person who would claim independent judgement nowadays would be frustrated and have no adherents’.
Ibn Idrīs certainly did interpret the Qurʾān and sunna ‘straight’ on his own authority, as O’Fahey put it, and he did it frequently – he had all the intellectual tools and qualifications needed to do so.
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- Sufis and SharīʿaThe Forgotten School of Mercy, pp. 253 - 279Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2022