In Islamic jurisprudence a madhhab is the body of legal rulings (ijtihad) a qualified imam derived from the Quran and hadith. A piece by Prothom Alo's religion desk shows that Muslim scholars in history moved from one madhhab to another for a range of reasons, some praiseworthy and some blameworthy.
It recalls Imam al-Dhahabi's advice that a student should first master one madhhab's legal text and its commentary, and only then weigh the strength of the evidence and decide (Siyar A'lam al-Nubala).
The first reason was the strength of evidence. Imam al-Shafi'i, on reaching Egypt and meeting new hadith and evidence, gave up earlier legal positions for new ones. Imam Ibn Daqiq al-Id grew up a Maliki but later became a Shafi'i.
The second was a teacher or institution. Imam al-Sam'ani was a Hanafi for thirty years before adopting the Shafi'i school under a Shafi'i master, while Imam al-Tahawi, though a student of the Shafi'i scholar al-Muzani, joined the Hanafi school through the Hanafi jurist Ahmad ibn Abi Imran. The third was independent research: Ibn Hazm of Andalusia went from Maliki to Shafi'i and finally rebuilt the Zahiri school, and Yemen's al-San'ani and al-Shawkani left the Zaydi tradition for independent ijtihad.
The fourth was regional need. The jurist Ahmad ibn Faris al-Razi moved from the Shafi'i to the Maliki school to keep it from dying out in the city of Rayy. In the Seljuk era, Baghdad's Nizamiyya and Mustansiriyya madrasas employed scholars of particular schools; Ibn al-Hubayr al-Salami moved from Hanbali to Shafi'i and took up teaching at the Nizamiyya.
There were blameworthy reasons too: changing views for money, jobs or posts. The grammarian Ibn al-Dahhan, a Hanbali, adopted the Shafi'i school to take a post reserved for Shafi'is at the Nizamiyya, which drew criticism at the time. The piece also notes cases of people moving between schools not to seek the truth but to find the easiest, most convenient fatwa.
Photo: The old Mustansiriya Madrasa in Baghdad, Makaay31 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Source: Prothom Alo
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