This Religion Is a Science 165orthodoxy among the Muslim community. But more importantly,
ijma served to consolidate the authority of the Ulama as the sole
determiners of acceptable Muslim behavior and beliefs. Indeed, it was
primarily through the use of ijma that the schools of law were formed.
Unfortunately, as these schools became firmly institutionalized in
the Muslim world, so did their legal judgments, so that eventually the
consensus of one generation of scholars became binding for successive
generations, with the result that the Ulama gradually became less
concerned with developing innovative solutions to contemporary
legal problems and more occupied with what in Islam is referred to
derisively as taqlid—the blind acceptance of juridical precedent.
One other major source of law must be mentioned. During the
formative stages of the Shariah, it was commonly believed that when
the Quran and the Sunna were silent on an issue, and if analogy and
consensus had failed to deliver a solution, a qualified legal scholar
could use his own independent juristic reasoning to issue a legal rul-
ing, or fatwa, which could then be accepted or rejected by the commu-
nity as they wished. Known as ijtihad, this was an absolutely vital
source of the law until the end of the tenth century, when the Tradi-
tionalist Ulama, who at that time dominated nearly all the major
schools of law, outlawed it as a legitimate tool of exegesis. The “clos-
ing of the gates of ijtihad,” as this action has been called, signaled the
beginning of the end for those who held that religious truth, as long as
it did not explicitly contradict the Revelation, could be discovered
through human reason.
By the beginning of the eleventh century, what began as ad hoc
gatherings of like-minded Ulama had become crystallized into legal
institutions empowered with the binding authority of God’s law. The
modern Sunni world has four such schools. The Shafii School, which
now dominates Southeast Asia, was founded on the principles of
Muhammad ash-Shafii (d. 820), who held the Sunna to be the most
important source of law. The Maliki School, which is primarily observed
in West Africa, was founded by Malik ibn Anas (d. 795), who relied
almost exclusively on the traditions of Medina in forming his opin-
ions. The Hanafi School of Abu Hanifah (d. 767), which prevails
across most of Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent, is by far the