taqlīd

taqlīd, in Islamic law, the unquestioning acceptance of the legal decisions of another without knowing the basis of those decisions. There is a wide range of opinion about taqlīd among different groups or schools of Muslims. The Andalusian jurist Ibn Ḥazm (died 1064) argued that any jurist who belongs to a school and does not disagree with any of its positions thereby engages in taqlīd. However, many adherents of the Shāfiʿī and Ḥanbalī schools of jurisprudence held that as long as the jurist knows the evidence for a received position, he does not follow it blindly and thus is free of taqlīd. Shiʿi Muslims adhere to an affirmative but quite different understanding of the institution.

Those Sunnis who affirm taqlīd believe that the legal scholars of the early period were uniquely qualified to derive authoritative legal opinions, binding upon the whole Muslim community, from the source materials of Islamic law, the Qurʾān and the Hadith (traditions concerning the Prophet’s life and utterances). In the early period, a series of great legal scholars exercised independent interpretation (ijtihād) of the sources, carrying out their efforts through the use of such legal tools as analogical reasoning (qiyās). In the third Islamic century (9th century ce) and subsequent centuries, with the emergence of legal schools formed around some of the most significant scholars, it came to be widely believed that all important questions of law had been dealt with and that the right of independent interpretation had been withdrawn for future generations. Henceforward, all were to accept the decisions of the early authorities—i.e., to exercise taqlīd toward them. This doctrine is usually expressed as “the closing of the gates of ijtihād.”

By contrast, Ḥanbalī scholars and others who follow the teachings of that school (e.g., the modern sect of the Wahhābīs) insist on the necessity of returning directly to the sources to make independent judgments of their meaning. In the 19th and 20th centuries, Muslim modernists, most notably Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī and Muḥammad ʿAbduh, engaged in bitter polemics against taqlīd, which they held encourages stagnation of the law and of socioeconomic development.

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In its use among the Shiʿah, taqlīd refers to the necessity for a layperson to accept and follow the opinions of an expert in Islamic law (mujtahid). Individuals who do not possess the qualifications to interpret the sources of the law must choose a member of the religious class (the ʿulamāʾ) whom they accept as their marjaʿ al-taqlīd (source of emulation) and whose teachings they observe. When their chosen mujtahid dies, they must select and obey another, because it is forbidden to follow a dead guide. In this sense, taqlīd is compulsory for the Shiʿah.