A teoria do “encerramento do Ijtihad” no direito islâmico

The postulate of classic Islamic jurisprudence of the ‘closing of the doors of ijtihad’, or the theory of abdicating from applying human reasoning to the extrapolation of law from sacred scripture, was posited by Orientalists as one of the reasons for the alleged inability of Islamic societies to stay abreast of the modern development which the West enjoyed. The closing of the doors of ijtihad appeared to be the credible cause for the seeming stagnation and lack of creativity of Muslim jurisprudence. Although pre-modern Islamic legal scholars and Orientalists agreed on the closing of the doors of ijtihad, the latter, in our time, has been the object of more acute study and of heated debate among academics. It is a commonly held view that neither the exercise nor the theory of Islamic law ever evinced the absence of ijtihad or of juridical creativity