Introduction

In scholarly literature, the history of the development in Daghestan of Islamic legal theory (usūl al-fiqh), in general, and the polemic on taqlīd and ijtihād, specifically, continue to receive little study. The few works that do address this topic do not fully reveal the depth of this polemic within the framework of Shāfiʿī legal tradition, which spread in Daghestan from the beginning of the eleventh century, the reasons it emerged or how it functioned from a historical perspective.

The main shortcoming of most existing works on Islamic law in Daghestan is that they do not consider the multi-layered character of ijtihād or the subtleties of discussions among the Daghestani Muslim elite concerning this topic. With rare exceptions, scholars study the problem of ijtihād without connecting it to the internal and external factors at play during the appearance and development of the ijtihād discourses. Also, there is still a tendency in Russian-language scholarship to present ijtihād as existing in opposition to taqlīd. However, as can be seen in Arabic-language Daghestani sources, ijtihād and taqlīd cannot be viewed as opposing or exclusive processes. Elements of ijtihād were never fully purged from the Shāfiʿī legal tradition. In fact, the boundary between ijtihād and taqlīd in the Daghestani written tradition is less than clear; those jurists who are described in the local tradition as supporters of taqlīd, in fact permitted the use of certain kinds of ijtihād. In other words, all the discussions of taqlīd and ijtihād in Daghestan were not based primarily upon the opposition of the two methods to each other, but, rather, focused on the permissibility of different levels of ijtihād.

These debates continued with varying degrees of intensity for several centuries and they were carried on across several historical epochs: the pre-colonial period, the colonial period and the early Soviet period. The variations in intensity of the polemic can be explained by several factors, including the outside influence of the great Islamic legal authorities of the Middle East. However, the discourses were also influenced by the internal socio-economic and political transformations of Daghestani society: the struggle of Daghestani jurists against the ascendancy of customary law (ʿadāt), the period of jihād against the Russian Empire and the Great Reforms of the second half of the nineteenth century, when Daghestan was integrated into the social and economic framework of the Russian Empire.