Who is qualified for ijtihad?

Ijtihad is the effort a qualified jurist makes to work out a ruling of Islamic law where the Qur'an and Sunnah give no explicit answer. Today, the authors say, two extremes dominate: treating the “gate of ijtihad” as permanently closed, and letting anyone with minimal training issue rulings. Both, they argue, come from not understanding why the classical conditions for a mujtahid, a jurist entitled to ijtihad, exist in the first place.

The paper traces ijtihad from the Prophet's time, citing the well-known report, whose authenticity it notes is debated, in which Muʿadh ibn Jabal said he would judge by the Book of Allah, then the Sunnah, then his own reasoning. It points to ʿUmar's suspension of the penalty for theft during a famine, to al-Shafiʿi and Abu Hanifah, and to Wael Hallaq's argument that ijtihad never really stopped. Across the Hanafi, Maliki, Shafiʿi and Hanbali schools the requirements broadly agree: mastery of the Qur'an, hadith and Arabic, and knowledge of consensus (ijmaʿ) and analogy (qiyas). Each school stresses different points, such as the Malikis' weight on the practice of the people of Madinah.

The authors argue these conditions are safeguards for reliable knowledge, not elitism. They quote al-Ghazali's image of reason as an instrument and the Shariʿah as light, each useless without the other, and al-Amidi's statement that the conditions protect the law from tampering. As a warning they point to the Khawarij, who, the paper says, read verses in isolation without the needed training. They then list modern obstacles: weakened traditional institutions, declining classical Arabic, online fatwas from unqualified people, political pressure on state muftis, narrow specialisation, and secular frameworks adopted uncritically.

Their answer is not to lower the bar but to build a route to it: eight to ten years of classical study in Qur'an, hadith, legal theory, comparative fiqh and Arabic, then several years of economics, bioethics, comparative law and social science, and finally practical training in mock fatwa councils under senior scholars. The paper concludes that disciplined ijtihad is the middle path between blind imitation and reckless rulings.