could exercise ijtihad. The lower-ranking jurists
were not qualified to use ijtihad; they were only
to follow the traditional rulings honored by their
own school and those authorized by mujtahids.
Even so, Sunni jurists recognized that ijtihad did
not have the certainty that the Quran, sunna, and
consensus had and that it could lead to an imper-
fect or incorrect ruling. Jurists in tWelve-imam
shiism accept the priority of the Quran when they
make rulings, but then they look to the infallible
pronouncements of the imams. In their view,
particularly in the UsUli school of Shii fiqh, the
mujtahid is a highly esteemed jurist who makes
rulings on behalf of the Hidden Imam until his
messianic return. Their rulings tend to hold more
aUthority, therefore, among the Shia than the rul-
ings of Sunni mujtahids hold among Sunnis.
When the great Muslim empires of the 16th
and 17th centuries—the Ottomans, Safavids, and
Mughals—weakened and fragmented in the face
of a series of internal and external challenges,
reform-minded ulama sought ways to reverse the
process and restore Muslim governments and
societies to their former grandeur. In part, they
blamed the sorry state of affairs in Muslim lands
on what they considered the rigidity and irratio-
nality of the traditional law schools and overem-
phasis on taqlid. Proclaiming that the “gate of
ijtihad” had been closed in the 10th century, they
wanted it reopened so that it could play a more
important role in adapting the sharia to mod-
ern life and restoring Islam to its original form.
Among those calling for such legal reform were
early Salafis such as Muhammad Abduh (d. 1905)
and a variety of later jurists and intellectuals.
Leading obstacles preventing such reformers from
realizing their goals have been a lack of agreement
about guidelines for how to conduct ijtihad and
the introduction of law codes based on Western
law. Nevertheless, many educated Muslims today
support the idea of using ijtihad to adapt the
sharia to modern life, even if it means turning
away from rulings preserved in the traditional
legal schools. Some very independently minded
reformers argue that it should be the right for any
educated Muslim to use ijtihad to bypass legal tra-
dition and construct an Islam suited to individual
values and spiritual outlook.
See also mUFti; reneWal and reForm move-
ments; salaFism.Further reading: Shaista P. Ali-Karamali and Fiona
Dunne, “The Ijtihad Controversy.” Arab Law Quarterly
9, no. 3 (1994): 238–257; Wael B. Hallaq, “Was the
Gate of Ijtihad Closed?” International Journal of Middle
East Studies 16 (1984): 3–41; Rudolph Peters, “Ijtihad
and Taqlid in 18th and 19th Century Islam.” Die Welt
des Islams 20 (1989): 132–145.Ikhwan al-Muslimin, al- See muslim
brotherhood.Ikhwan al-Safa See brethren of purity.
imam (Arabic: leader, guide, a person to
be imitated)
Imam is a term that has several meanings in
Islamic belief and practice. Its basic meaning for
Sunnis is “leader of group prayer” (salat), literally
the one “in front of” the congregation, standing
before the mihrab (niche indicating the qibla,
direction of prayer, facing the kaaba in mecca).
A leader of prayer can be any qualified adult
with sufficient knowledge of the prayer ritual.
Although “prayer leader” is the basic meaning of
the term imam, in practice an imam’s function also
includes giving the sermon (khutba) from the pul-
pit (minbar) as part of Friday noon prayer, relating
interpretation of Islamic religious and legal texts
(for example, qUran, hadith, fiqh, theology)
to current events and issues in the local Muslim
community. Customarily, men must lead mixed or
male-only prayer gatherings, and Women lead only
women’s prayer groups. This traditional exclusion
of women from the imam’s function in mixedimam 347 J