‹ Previous · Contents · Next ›

طَبَقَاتُ الْأَقْوَالِ · Tabaqat al-Aqwal: Whose View You Take, and in What Order

قَوْلُ الْإِمَامِ أَبِي حَنِيفَةَ · Imam Abu Hanifa's View (first tier)

Start with Abū Ḥanīfa's view. That is the first tier. In matters of worship, ʿibādāt, you take his view always. You also take it whenever one of his two main students, Abū Yūsuf or Muḥammad, agrees with him.

When the Imām and his two students disagree, you take what Abū Ḥanīfa (d. 150H) himself chose. That holds whether or not one of the students happens to be on his side.

↑ Top of page

إِذَا صَحَّ الْحَدِيثُ فَهُوَ مَذْهَبِي · "If the Hadith Is Sound, It Is My Madhhab", and the Two Conditions That Come With It

This is soundly reported from Abū Ḥanīfa (d. 150H), and al-Shaʿrānī (d. 973H) reports it from all four imāms. It means that if you act on a sound ḥadīth, even where it goes against what looks like the school's view, you are still inside the madhhab. A follower who does this does not stop being Ḥanafī. But people quote this line on its own, and on its own it is misleading. Two conditions come with it.

Condition one is about the ḥadīth, and about you. The ḥadīth has to be sound. It has to say the thing outright, not by hint. Nothing else may clash with it. It must not be one of those the scholars read as a figure of speech. No later text must have been found cancelling it, none narrowing it to certain cases, and none adding a condition to it. And you must not be able to find any reason why the Imām himself chose not to act on it. On top of all that, the man acting on it has to be able to study such texts himself, and to tell which text came later and cancelled which.

Condition two is the one people forget. The ḥadīth has to line up with some view that already exists inside the school. The Ḥanafī imāms never gave anyone permission to strike out on his own on a point the whole school rejects together.

↑ Top of page

أَقْوَالُ أَصْحَابِ الْإِمَامِ فِي الْحَقِيقَةِ أَقْوَالُهُ: "إِنْ تَوَجَّهَ لَكُمْ دَلِيلٌ فَقُولُوا بِهِ" · The Students' Views Are Really the Imam's Own: "If a Proof Becomes Clear to You, Take It"

Abū Ḥanīfa (d. 150H) told his students: if a proof becomes clear to you, take it. Abū Yūsuf (d. 182H) said he never held a view against Abū Ḥanīfa except one the Imām had held himself at some point. Zufar (d. 158H) said much the same: he never differed with him except over something the Imām had said and then dropped.

Here is something that surprises students. The two students differ from Abū Ḥanīfa (d. 150H) in about two thirds of the school's rulings. And we still rely on the Imām's view in practice. The reason is in how the school was built. Before a position was settled, he would put it to forty of his students who had reached ijtihād, and they would work on it for a month. So the madhhab was built by the group, not by one man on his own.

↑ Top of page

قَوْلُ الصَّاحِبَيْنِ (أَبِي يُوسُفَ وَمُحَمَّدٍ) · The Two Students' View: Abu Yusuf and Muhammad (second tier)

Sometimes the two students differ from the Imām because the times had changed, not because the proof had changed. That is called ikhtilāf al-ʿaṣr. One example is how you judge whether a person is outwardly upright, and so can be trusted as a witness. In cases like that you take the students' view, because they were answering different conditions on the ground.

What if Abū Ḥanīfa (d. 150H) is on one side and both students are on the other? Some say the muftī may pick either side. The sounder view is to take Abū Ḥanīfa's side. The one exception is a muftī who is himself a mujtahid. He weighs the proofs and decides for himself.

↑ Top of page

قَوْلُ زُفَرَ وَالْحَسَنِ بْنِ زِيَادٍ · Zufar and al-Hasan b. Ziyad (third tier)

If nothing is found from Abū Yūsuf (d. 182H), you go next to Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥasan, the greatest of Abū Ḥanīfa's students after him. After Muḥammad come Zufar (d. 158H) and al-Ḥasan ibn Ziyād (d. 204H). Those two sit at the same level as each other.

Al-Fatāwā al-Sirājiyya puts the whole order plainly: fatwā follows Abū Ḥanīfa, then Abū Yūsuf, then Muḥammad, then Zufar and al-Ḥasan ibn Ziyād.

One caveat. The wording in al-Nahr suggests al-Ḥasan ibn Ziyād (d. 204H) really comes just after Zufar (d. 158H), rather than level with him. But "level with him" is the wording you will meet more often across the books.

↑ Top of page

عَدَمُ التَّخْيِيرِ لِلْمُقَلِّدِ فِي زَمَانِنَا: وُجُوبُ اتِّبَاعِ التَّرْتِيبِ الْمَذْهَبِيِّ · No Free Choice for Today's Muqallid Mufti: He Follows the Order

A muftī who is a mujtahid may pick whichever imām's view has the stronger proof, and pay no attention to the ranking. That is the sounder view. But the age of such a muftī has ended. What is left is the plain follower. So he has to go down the order instead: the Imām's view first, then the next, and so on. The one thing that changes this is if later mujtahids of the school have themselves declared the opposite view to be the sound one.

↑ Top of page

مَسَائِلُ تَرْجِيحِ قَوْلِ الصَّاحِبَيْنِ أَوْ زُفَرَ: عِشْرُونَ مَوْضِعًا فِي مَنْظُومَةِ ابْنِ عَابِدِينَ · Where the Students' or Zufar's View Is Preferred: Twenty Cases in Ibn ʿAbidin's Own Poem

Later scholars are sometimes found preferring the two students' view, sometimes just one student's, and sometimes Zufar's. Al-Bayrī (d. 1099H) was the first to collect these cases. Al-Ḥamawī (d. 1098H) put them into verse, but he added some that do not belong. Ibn ʿĀbidīn (d. 1252H) then wrote his own poem, dropped the wrong ones, added several more, and reached twenty solid cases. He records them in his Radd al-Muḥtār, in the chapter on nafaqa.

↑ Top of page

الْإِفْتَاءُ بِقَوْلِ غَيْرِ الْإِمَامِ · When No Founding Imam Has an Answer

Sometimes none of the founding imāms answered the question at all. Then you take what most of the recognised senior scholars held. Men like Abū Ḥafṣ al-Kabīr (d. 217H), Abū Jaʿfar al-Hinduwānī (d. 362H), Abū al-Layth al-Samarqandī (d. 373H) and al-Ṭaḥāwī (d. 321H).

↑ Top of page

إِذَا لَمْ يُعْرَفْ تَارِيخُ قَوْلَيْنِ مُتَعَارِضَيْنِ لِلْإِمَامِ: ثَلَاثُ مَرَاتِبَ لِمَنْ يَخْتَارُ · When the Imam Has Two Views and Nobody Knows Which Came First

One mujtahid cannot hold two opposite views at the same time. So if you know which view came later, treat the later one as him taking back the first. If you do not know which came later, take whichever view has another report backing it up. That is the correct one.

And if nothing at all marks one of them out? Then it depends who you are. A mujtahid inside the school weighs the two by the recognised tests for preferring one view over another. If that still settles nothing, he acts on whichever one his own heart rests on. A student of fiqh who has not reached ijtihād, which is most muftīs today, simply follows the later scholars, and takes whichever view looks to him more correct and safer. And an ordinary person follows the fatwā of the most trustworthy and most learned muftī he can find.

↑ Top of page

جُنَّةُ الْعَالِمِ "لَا أَدْرِي" · The Scholar's Shield Is "I Don't Know"

Usually, when a muftī cannot find a clear ruling, the problem is his own searching, not a hole in the school. A real case almost never comes up that the books do not already cover, either by name, or by a broad rule wide enough to take it in.

↑ Top of page

لَا يَجُوزُ الِاعْتِمَادُ عَلَى الْقَاعِدَةِ الْكُلِّيَّةِ وَحْدَهَا فِي الْإِفْتَاءِ · A Legal Maxim on Its Own Is Not Enough to Build a Fatwa On

Two words worth keeping apart. A qāʿida, a legal maxim, is a broad rule that covers many separate cases drawn from different chapters of fiqh. A ḍābiṭ is narrower: it only works inside one chapter.

All four madhhabs agree that fiqh maxims hold true in most cases, not in every case. Every one of them has exceptions. So the muftī's job is to report the actual text that has come down on the question. If he cannot find one, he holds back, or he asks someone more learned, even if that man lives in another town.

↑ Top of page

وُجُوهُهُ السِّتَّةُ لِعَدَمِ الِاعْتِمَادِ عَلَى الْكُتُبِ فِي الْإِفْتَاءِ · The Six Reasons a Book May Not Be Relied Upon

Six reasons a book cannot be trusted for fatwā. One, no care was taken to check the text. Two, it is written so short that it misleads. Three, it prefers a view against the stronger one. Four, it carries weak views. Five, we do not know how reliable the author was. Six, we cannot tell who a view was taken from.

↑ Top of page

تَتَبُّعُ خَطَإٍ وَاحِدٍ عَبْرَ عِشْرِينَ كِتَابًا · One Mistake, Copied Into Twenty Later Books

A view can show up in about twenty later books and still be wrong. One man made the mistake first. Everyone after him copied it, each from the one before.

↑ Top of page

مِثَالٌ: انْقِلَابُ فَتْوَى الِاسْتِئْجَارِ عَلَى تَعْلِيمِ الْقُرْآنِ إِلَى مُجَرَّدِ التِّلَاوَةِ · Worked Example: The Inverted Ruling on Paid Quran Recitation

The base rule is that you cannot hire someone to do an act of worship. Worship counts for the one who does it. So the real ruling allows payment only for TEACHING the Qurʾān, by istiḥsān, because otherwise it would be lost. It never allows payment for reciting on its own.

Almost every author after the writer of al-Jawhara followed this plain mistake. Ibn ʿĀbidīn (d. 1252H) says most scholars of his own day held it too. The reciter ends up reciting for the wage, not for Allah, which is showing off. Qāḍīkhān (d. 593H) says taking payment for dhikr stops any reward being earned at all.

↑ Top of page

قِصَّةُ ابْنِ عَابِدِينَ فِي فَتْوَى الْوَقْفِ · Ibn ʿĀbidīn's Own Warning Story: His Correct Fatwā Was Rejected

Ibn ʿĀbidīn (d. 1252H) once gave a correct fatwā on a waqf question. Al-Ḥaṣkafī's (d. 1088H) own Durr al-Mukhtār had got that same point wrong. Local muftīs turned his correct ruling down because it did not match the Durr. One of them said he would not accept Ibn ʿĀbidīn's view even if it differed.

Ibn ʿĀbidīn's own verdict on what happened: look at this plain ignorance, this recklessness in matters of Sharīʿa, this readiness to give fatwā without knowledge and without checking.

↑ Top of page

‹ Previous · Contents · Next ›