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derive a ruling from the Sharee’ah on a difficult issue by an
authoritative Islamic scholar.”
Allah, Who Knows all what will happen since ever, could have
sent a Sharee’ah that gives the minutest details on each and every
issue that all the generations of Muslims will face. But in His
Divine Wisdom, He sent general as well as detailed rulings and
left the door to Ijtihad open, so that the Muslim scholars would
deliberate on the Book and the Sunnah and guide the believers in
matters of the Sharee’ah. The blind-followers of the Madhhabs
however closed the door that Allah left open and claimed, “Ijtihad
has been closed since the fourth century of Islam.”
But this is both impractical and impossible, and the proponents of
Taqleed have themselves never kept up to this claim of theirs, as
we shall see next.
Analyzing the Claimed Benefits of Taqleed
(Claim - 1) Only these four Imams have the best
compilation of all aspects of the Sharee’ah.
The Deobandis claim that only the four Imams have perfectly
compiled all the different branches of the Sharee’ah and therefore
they alone can be made Taqleed of. None has such a perfect
compilation before them and no one will ever accomplish such a
perfect compilation. They consider the compilations by the Imams
to be more perfect than those by any of the Sahabah or the
Tab’ieen. They dare to say, “We do not find such codification (of
the branches of Islamic learning) either of the Sahabah or other
Tab’ieen” 623
They say that the four Imams are “the first and only Imams who
gathered them (i.e. all branches of Islamic learning) in every
detail”, after which there is no further need for Ijtihad. The only
623 Quoted from the article, “The Sharee’ah role of Taqleed” and “Why
should Taqleed be made of one of the four Imams” by Mufti
Mahmood Hassan Gangohi - Published in Awake (Jan/Feb 1996), by
YMMA, South Africa.
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