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Ijtihad (Meanings, Application & Scope)
Tahir-ul-Qadri, Dr. Muhammad
Tahir-ul-Qadri, Dr. Muhammad
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ijtihad_1.pdf
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Abstract
"Seeing through the post 9/11 ordeal and the events taking shape in its backdrop, one can hear the loud whisper: ‘where people are ignorant, uncritical and irrational, they are unjust, cruel, ready to perpetrate and to tolerate abuses of unscr upulous and unchecked power.’ The Muslim Umma, instead of making the best of God-sent treasure of guidance, has consigned it to oblivion, sheer ignorant of the nihilist forces and their ruthless modus operandi. It were Muslims who, once upon a time, illumined the world with the light of ‘guidance’ and gave birth to the present day Europe. In the words of the 20th century eminent scholar Dr. Robert Briffault in his famous book The Making of Humanity: “It was not science which brought Europe back to life. Other and manifold influences from the civilization of Islam communicated its first glow to European life … Down to the fifteenth century whatever scientific activity existed in Europe was engaged in assimilating Arab learning without greatly adding to it…The Canons of Avicenna (Ibn Sina) and the Surgery of Abu’l-Qasim, remained the text books of medical science throughout Europe until the seventeenth century.”1 According to him, the Arabs introduced three inventions into Europe, each of which was to bring about a worldtransforming revolution: 1. Dr Robert Bri ffault, The Making of Humanity, pp. 202, 207. Ijtihad: meanings, 8 appli cation & scope 1. The mariner’s compass which was to expand Europe to the ends of the earth; 2. Gun-powder which was to bring to an end the supremacy of the armoured knight; 3. And paper which prepared the way for the printing press and opened numerous doors of knowledge and learning. The Muslims were then a rational community, employing all their faculties of mind, doing a scientific errand on the globe. Open, refined, humanizing, creative, productive, promoting man’s stature round the earth, they went everywhere and lit the lamps of reasoning, logic, scientific method and love and dignity of mankind. History pays them homage. But then it so happened that the law of nature wrapped their day into the night and the lamp of reason was put out; they slipped into a dreadful slumber and lost their contact with reality. Now they were rigid misologists reposing in the idea of the bygone glory. Allama Dr Muhammad Iqbal felt the misery and strived to enlighten them: “The ultimate spiritual basis of all life, as conceived by Islam, is eternal and reveals itself in variety and change. A society based on such a conception of Reality, must reconcile in its life, the categories of permanence and change. It must possess eternal principles to regulate its collective life; for the eternal gives us a foothold in the world of perpetual change. But eternal principles, when they are understood to exclude all possibilities of change which, according to the Qur’an, is one of the greatest signs of God, tend to immobilize what is essentially mobile in its nature.”2 But the things had taken a calamitous shape. They are not ready even today to reconcile the changed realities with the permanent divine law and have thus failed in regulating their life in the world of perpetual change in accordance with the revealed eternal principles – their main foothold. This process of reconciling the ever-changing realities with the intentions of the permanent laws is what is called ijtihad."(pg 7-9)
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2007
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With permission of the license/copyright holder