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What is a Madhhab? Why is it necessary to follow one?
© Nuh Ha Mim Keller 2000
The word madhhab is derived from an Arabic word meaning "to go" or
"to take as a way", and refers to a mujtahid's choice in regard to
a number of interpretive possibilities in deriving the rule of Allah from
the primary texts of the Qur'an and hadith on a particular question. In
a larger sense, a madhhab represents the entire school of thought
of a particular mujtahid Imam, such as Abu Hanifa, Malik, Shafi'i,
or Ahmad--together with many first-rank scholars that came after each of
these in their respective schools, who checked their evidences and refined
and upgraded their work. The mujtahid Imams were thus explainers,
who operationalized the Qur'an and sunna in the specific shari'a rulings
in our lives that are collectively known as fiqh or "jurisprudence".
In relation to our din or "religion", this fiqh is only part
of it, for the religious knowledge each of us possesses is of three types.
The first type is the general knowledge of tenets of Islamic belief in the
oneness of Allah, in His angels, Books, messengers, the prophethood of Muhammad
(Allah bless him and give him peace), and so on. All of us may derive this
knowledge directly from the Qur'an and hadith, as is also the case with
a second type of knowledge, that of general Islamic ethical principles to
do good, avoid evil, cooperate with others in good works, and so forth.
Every Muslim can take these general principles, which form the largest and
most important part of his religion, from the Qur'an and hadith.
The third
type of knowledge is that of the specific understanding of particular
divine commands and prohibitions that make up the shari'a. Here,
because of both the nature and the sheer number of the Qur'an and hadith
texts involved, people differ in the scholarly capacity to understand
and deduce rulings from them. But all of us have been commanded to live
them in our lives, in obedience to Allah, and so Muslims are of two types,
those who can do this by themselves, and they are the mujtahid
Imams; and those who must do so by means of another, that is, by following
a mujtahid Imam, in accordance with Allah's word in Surat
al-Nahl,
"
Ask those who recall, if you know not " (Qur'an 16:43),
and in Surat
al-Nisa,
"
If they had referred it to the Messenger and to those of authority among
them, then those of them whose task it is to find it out would have known
the matter " (Qur'an 4:83),
in which the
phrase those of them whose task it is to find it out, expresses the words
"alladhina yastanbitunahu minhum", referring to those possessing
the capacity to draw inferences directly from the evidence, which is called
in Arabic istinbat.
These and
other verses and hadiths oblige the believer who is not at the level of
istinbat or directly deriving rulings from the Qur'an and hadith
to ask and follow someone in such rulings who is at this level. It is
not difficult to see why Allah has obliged us to ask experts, for if each
of us were personally responsible for evaluating all the primary texts
relating to each question, a lifetime of study would hardly be enough
for it, and one would either have to give up earning a living or give
up ones din, which is why Allah says in surat al-Tawba,
in the context of jihad:
"
Not all of the believers should go to fight. Of every section of them,
why does not one part alone go forth, that the rest may gain knowledge
of the religion and admonish their people when they return, that perhaps
they may take warning " (Qur'an 9:122).
The slogans
we hear today about "following the Qur'an and sunna instead of following
the madhhabs" are wide of the mark, for everyone agrees that we must
follow the Qur'an and the sunna of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give
him peace). The point is that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him
peace) is no longer alive to personally teach us, and everything we have
from him, whether the hadith or the Qur'an, has been conveyed to us through
Islamic scholars. So it is not a question of whether or not to take our
din from scholars, but rather, from which scholars. And this is the reason
we have madhhabs in Islam: because the excellence and superiority
of the scholarship of the mujtahid Imams--together with the traditional
scholars who followed in each of their schools and evaluated and upgraded
their work after them--have met the test of scholarly investigation and
won the confidence of thinking and practicing Muslims for all the centuries
of Islamic greatness. The reason why madhhabs exist, the benefit
of them, past, present, and future, is that they furnish thousands of sound,
knowledge-based answers to Muslims questions on how to obey Allah. Muslims
have realized that to follow a madhhab means to follow a super scholar
who not only had a comprehensive knowledge of the Qur'an and hadith texts
relating to each issue he gave judgements on, but also lived in an age a
millennium closer to the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) and
his Companions, when taqwa or "godfearingness" was the norm--both of which
conditions are in striking contrast to the scholarship available today.
While the
call for a return to the Qur'an and sunna is an attractive slogan, in
reality it is a great leap backward, a call to abandon centuries of detailed,
case-by-case Islamic scholarship in finding and spelling out the commands
of the Qur'an and sunna, a highly sophisticated, interdisciplinary effort
by mujtahids, hadith specialists, Qur'anic exegetes, lexicographers,
and other masters of the Islamic legal sciences. To abandon the fruits
of this research, the Islamic shari'a, for the following of contemporary
sheikhs who, despite the claims, are not at the level of their predecessors,
is a replacement of something tried and proven for something at best tentative.
The rhetoric
of following the shari'a without following a particular madhhab
is like a person going down to a car dealer to buy a car, but insisting
it not be any known make--neither a Volkswagen nor Rolls-Royce nor Chevrolet--but
rather "a car, pure and simple". Such a person does not really know what
he wants; the cars on the lot do not come like that, but only in kinds.
The salesman may be forgiven a slight smile, and can only point out that
sophisticated
products come from sophisticated means of production, from factories with
a division of labor among those who test, produce, and assemble the many
parts of the finished product. It is the nature of such collective human
efforts to produce something far better than any of us alone could produce
from scratch, even if given a forge and tools, and fifty years, or even
a thousand. And so it is with the shari'a, which is more complex
than any car because it deals with the universe of human actions and a
wide interpretative range of sacred texts. This is why discarding the
monumental scholarship of the madhhabs in operationalizing the
Qur'an and sunna in order to adopt the understanding of a contemporary
sheikh is not just a mistaken opinion. It is scrapping a Mercedes for
a go-cart.
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