The Gates of Ijtihad

A number of reasons stool been given for this decline. The political disintegration of the Caliphate in the later unstained period has been identified as one possible cause.

The enormous synthesis attempted by the Arabic philosophers, on the lines of Aristotle and Plato, gum olibanum breaks down in later times entirely. This surely is not without relation to the splintering and weakening of the Arab state, which proceeded apace after the after part/tenth century (Dunlop, 1971, p. 203).

Related to political fragmentation is economical fragmentation. Classical Islam was an urban, commercial civilization; both intra-Islamic political engagement and external invasion (by Turks and Crusaders, and later by the Mongols) broke backing links and caused economic decline of cities across the Muslim b all told (Lombard, 1975, p. 10).

The most popular cause given for Islamic decline, at least in the West, is however the influence of Islam itself, specifically of apparitional authority stifling independent thought. "Fanatical Mohammedans" [sic] are a longstanding Western trope, and for ultramodern Western secularists they provide a suitable warning of the possible effects of Christian fundamentalism. roughly items of evidence can be found to support these arguments in a more sophisticated form. Occasionalism, a position which holds that all indispensable events ("occasions") are direct actions of God, gained a developed following in classical Islamic thought (Fakhry, 1938, p. 1). such(prenominal) a view unde

________ (1974). The gamble of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization. Vol. II: The Expansion of Islam in the Middle Periods.

Actually, formal precedent as it exists in Anglo-American lawfulness did not exist as such in Islamic civil law. Judges ruled independently, "not as part of a continuing 'court'" (Hodgson, 1974, v. 2, p. 123), but a similar effect of stability was provided by the gradual aggregation of fatwa, advisory opinions by eminent jurists, to which later judges could refer.

For a similar reason, a relative "stagnation" of Islamic gifted enquiry after the Golden Age was inevitable.

As the governing body of thought developed it identified boundaries beyond which lay risks of self-contradiction, or of undermining basic principles that had become generally accepted -- and for which, if undermined, no executable replacements seemed to exist. This again is by no means peculiar to Islam; modern science resists "fringe" speculation (e.g., UFOs or the theories of Velikovsky) for similar reasons.

rmines the natural sciences, at least insofar as these seek to find out natural laws.

As the legal system matured, however, the insights and solutions found became established principles of law, relied upon by both jurists themselves and the public they served. Fewer cases posed surprise new challenges, because a large body of law was at hand to resolve most of them. The need for legal designing dwindled, and the risks -- in upsetting precedents and leaving everyone uncertain of previously well-established law -- became greater.

Classical Islamic thought therefore had a portentous (by no means absolute) bias in favor of lines of inquiry that would clarify problems of this sort -- what, for example, constitutes fair dealing in heterogeneous situations -- rather than those that led away from worldly concerns. Specifically, this gave Islamic understanding development a strong bias toward law. It is not surprising, thus, that the quadruplet gr
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