Legal reform in the Muslim world: The anatomy of a scholarly dispute in the 19th and the early 20th centuries on the usage of Ijtihad as a legal tool.

This dissertation examines the polysemic nuances of the concept ijtihad as used in the Muslim world by the reform movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This discourse, I argue, was informed as much by factors germane to the political upheavals of the era as it was by the intellectual heritage of Islam. The colonial experience, in this regard, was particularly portentous, for it created, so to speak, the need for ijtihad. Ijtihad, as such, was perceived as an indigenous intellectual tool preeminently suited to, amongst other things, the appropriation of the libertarian values of European colonialists into Muslim society. There was an understanding on the part of key elements of Muslim society, that it was ijtihad, no less, that spawned the intellectual efflorescence of early Islam. Given that fact, it could, once again, be trusted to revive the waning fortunes of the shari'ah, or the sacred Law that was so ravaged by the upheavals of the time. But, as I attempt to show, ijtihad so construed, as synonymous with revival and reform, is indeed a novel idea in Islam, one crystallized by the peculiarities of the social and political changes of the time, changes that were, on the whole, unprecedented in Muslim history. Furthermore, I show, that during the genesis of the Law this concept was no more than an ancillary tool in the repertoire of the legal scholar. This dissertation also focuses on the so-called 'closing of the doors of ijtihad' and its concomitant, the regimen of taqlid. In examining the reactions of the proponents of taqlid to the calls for ijtihad, it attempts to unravel the various perspectives on this historical phenomenon and examines the fact these still obtain, to this day, in some parts of the Muslim world only and not in others.PhDNear Eastern StudiesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/104109/1/9500921.pdfDescription of 9500921.pdf : Restricted to UM users only