The questions belonging to this chapter are many, yet what has occurred to us just now is all that we have set down. Should anyone meet with other, well-known issues in this field—issues about which the jurists of the various regions have famously differed and whose reports are readily available—he ought to record them here, for the purpose is precisely to register the celebrated disputed questions among the jurists together with those matters for which the Law itself speaks explicitly.
As we have said more than once, our aim in this book is to establish the scripturally explicit questions, both those on which agreement exists and those on which disagreement persists, and to cite from the unspoken matters only those whose difference among the jurists of the provinces has become famous. Knowledge of these two categories furnishes the mujtahid with principles for cases on which the sources are silent and for unprecedented situations whose disagreement has not become widespread, whether or not a position has been transmitted from any one of the jurists.
Thus, one who has trained himself in these questions and understood the underlying causes that produced the jurists’ disagreements will, when a new case arises, be able to give the required ruling—namely, to answer in accordance with the school of one of the recognised jurists concerning that very issue—and will know when that jurist has departed from his own foundations and when he has not, provided a fatwa from him exists on the matter.
If no fatwa has been transmitted from that jurist, or if it has not reached the researcher engaged with these principles, he may still supply an answer in keeping with the jurist’s foundational maxims and in accordance with the truth to which his own ijtihad leads him.
God willing, once we have completed this book we intend to compile, for the Mālikī school, a comprehensive work that gathers its foundational doctrines and its well-known issues—issues that function within the school as roots upon which subsidiary rulings are built. This is exactly what Ibn al-Qāsim accomplished in the Mudawwana: whenever he lacked a direct statement from Mālik, he answered by analogy with Mālik’s opinions in that category that serve as foundational precedents, for people are naturally inclined to follow and imitate in legal rulings and fatwas.
Nevertheless, this present book has the capacity, as we have already said, to raise a person to the rank of independent reasoning, provided he first acquires sufficient competence in Arabic and in the principles of jurisprudence.
For this reason we have deemed the most fitting title for the work to be: The Beginning of the Mujtahid and the Sufficiency of the Moderate Seeker.