A Simple Guide to ISLAM
Fiqh – Jurisprudence
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problems. The Successors exercised
ijtihad
in two ways. First, they
were not afraid of giving preference to the opinions of one
Companion over another and sometimes, even the opinions of a
Successor over those of a Companion. Secondly they exercised
original thinking themselves. In fact, the real formation of Islamic
law starts in more or less professional manner at the hands of the
Successors.
With the Successors, the Islamic law began to take its formal shape
and develop into an independent subject of study. In this age the
principles which governed
fiqh
were the Qur'an,
Sunnah
and
Qiyas
(deductive reasoning). These principles were introduced by the
Prophet himself.
Whenever any problem arose the Muslims tried to solve it by first
referring to the Qur'an; if no definite answer was found in the
Qur'an then they would turn to the
Sunnah
; if there too the
problem remained to be solved then they resorted to consensus of
the scholars; and as a final recourse they drew an analogy with the
Qur'an and
Sunnah
.
Here is an example of how an analogy is drawn. For instance
alcoholic beverage is prohibited in the Qur’an, but there is no
mention of hard drugs. Since alcohol is prohibited because of its
intoxicating effect and since hard drugs generate a similar effect,
then by analogy
(qiyas)
hard drugs are also prohibited.
As we have seen above, the science of jurisprudence had come
into existence with the advent of Islam, but it developed as a
regular discipline in the second century A.H. Abu Hanifa has
