translation, for to understand a person’s words is tantamount to recognizing the person himself. End quote.

A further condition is that the judge be able to speak, for a mute individual cannot pronounce a judgment and not everyone will grasp his gestures.

He must also be a mujtahid—even if only within the school whose leading imam he follows—so that he can discern the stronger opinion from the weaker.

Shaykh al-Islam Ibn Taymiyyah said, “These conditions are applied according to what is possible, and the office must be given to the best available candidate. Ahmad and others make this clear: one appoints the more beneficial of the two sinners, the one whose evil is less, and, among the muqallids, the more upright and the better versed in the method of taqlīd.”

The author of Kitāb al-Furūʿ comments, “Exactly so.”

Al-Insāf, on the question of appointing a muqallid, adds: “This has long been the accepted practice; otherwise the people’s legal affairs would grind to a halt.”

Ibn al-Qayyim stated that a mujtahid is someone knowledgeable of the Qur’an and the Sunnah, and that his status as a mujtahid does not prevent him from occasionally following another scholar; indeed, none of the great imams is free of having followed someone more learned than himself in certain rulings.