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Abstract
This paper has three overlapping concerns. First, it reviews some instances of how the idea of ijtihad has figured in the discourses of the modern 'ulama'. Second, it shows how the debates on this contested subject can shed some light on intellectual exchanges between Arab Middle Eastern and South Asian scholars and, more specifically, between the reformist Salafis of the Arab world and the Deobandis of the Indian subcontinent. It argues, finally, that the language and rhetoric of ijtihad have tended to increasingly recommend themselves to the 'ulama' as a way of rearticulating their claims to religious authority in the modern world.
Few terms have been invoked more often in modern intra-Muslim debates than ijtihäd. Modernist Muslims have frequently invited their coreligionists to rethink their dogmatic certainties in terms of ijtihäd; and the Muslim governing elite have no less frequently justified their legislative and judicial measures as forms of ijtihäd. Since the late 19th century, many Muslims have come to explicitly reject the authority of the medieval schools of law in favour of unmediated recourse to the Islamic foundational texts - the Qur'än and the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be on him) - as well as the practice of the earliest generations of Muslim forbears (the salaj). Many Sunni Islamists have had a more ambivalent attitude towards ijtihäd, though appeals to it have continued to form part of their critique of the traditionally-educated Muslim religious scholars, the 'ulama'.
Against the overlapping challenges of the Salafïs and the Islamists, modernist Muslims and modernizing Muslim governments, many among the Sunnï 'ulama' of modem times, especially in South Asia, have often expressed grave misgivings about ijtihâd. Their discomfort has rested, inter alia, on the conviction that the scholarly tradition is not only a repertoire of authoritative norms but also of agreed-upon methods for interpreting the foundational texts. Any willingness to set aside these time-honoured methods immediately raises the spectre of wilfully subordinating God's word to ill-informed guesswork which serves only to pave the way towards interpretive anarchy.1 Yet, caricatures apart, many among the 'ulama', too, have come to adopt what I would frequently refer to as the "language" or the rhetoric of ijtihâd, that is, to affirm that it is not just possible...