Answer
Salam Hasyir,
Thank you for this question. Honestly it deserves a really lengthy answer, perhaps volumes. For this reason, please find part one of the answer to your question below. Find the second and final part at the link here.
Let’s make the best use of this opportunity in reminding you and our honorable readers on some important facts that explain our juristic heritage and above all, our religion.
The Prophet and Divine Guidance
Let’s start from the beginning during the time of Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) when guidance regarding daily situations and solutions for any problems was simply derived directly from the Quran and the actual example of the Prophet himself.
From that time till today, the Quran and the Sunnah of the Prophet which includes his sayings, actions, and agreements constitute the main sources for practice for every Muslim.
Scholars normally go directly to the Quran and the Sunnah to get solutions for people’s problems and answers for their queries.
With this understanding, we can say that whatever shows up in the life of a Muslim should be addressed in light of the Quran and the Sunnah and that should be the main madhhab (school of thought) everyone bears in his mind.
The Companions and Practicing Ijtihad
After the Prophet’s death, some of the Companions took the responsibility of finding answers to the juristic questions by looking into the Quran, the Prophet’s Sunnah and, in cases where the issue was totally new, they tried to draw an analogy between it and a similar issue that happened during the Prophet’s life.
Sometimes there would be no similar incident in the Prophet’s life that could be used as a reference, and, in those situations, the Companions used to find a new verdict based on the general guidelines of the Quran and the Sunnah. This paved the way for ‘ijtihad’ to come into formulation.
Yet, not all the Companions took on this important task, it was only some of them who were known for their deep knowledge of Islamic law and the Prophet’s judgments.
Amongst these were the Four Rightly-Guided Caliphs as well as Abdullah ibn Masud, Abu Musa Al-Ashari, Ubay ibn Kab, Zayd ibn Thabit, and Muadh ibn Jabal.
In their process of ijtihad, the Companions were always in the habit of deducting the ruling from the apparent literal meaning of a text or from the reason or the wisdom behind a ruling stated in the text, and this latter one paved the way to the establishment of what was later called ‘analogical deduction’ or ‘qiyas‘.
The Era of the Successors
During the time of the Successors, the same methodology, with a bit of expansion and focus on ijtihad, continued and new names appeared including Salim ibn Abdillah ibn Umar, Nafi the freed-slave of Abdullah ibn Umar, Ibn Shihab Az-Zuhri, Alqamah ibn Qays from Iraq, Ata ibn Abi Rabah of Makkah, and Umar ibn Abd Al-Aziz in the Levant.
The same way of dealing with religious issues continued later on, but it started to take the form of established discipline of knowledge as the Islamic state expanded immensely and the whole age was called the age of recording or writing down various branches of knowledge.
Please continue reading part two at the link here.
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