The Error of Ignorance of Reality

We have likewise heard people say, “What concern is it of ours to acquaint ourselves with that reality?” Should such a statement ever be made, it is likewise a mistake.

Justice demands that we say: in every branch of knowledge there must be specialists who are thoroughly versed in it and who cooperate with one another in sincere, brotherly, Islamic cooperation—free of partisanship and fanaticism—so that the interests of the Muslim Ummah are achieved and so that every believer’s aspiration is realized: the establishment of an Islamic society and the implementation of Allah’s Law upon His earth.

All of those sciences are therefore a collective obligation (farḍ kifāyah) upon the body of Muslim scholars. No single individual is required to master them all, quite apart from the fact that doing so is, in practice, impossible.

To give one example: a physician is not entitled, on occasion, to declare a particular surgical procedure permissible unless he first seeks the view of a scholar-jurist who is grounded in the Book of Allah, in the Sunnah of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, and in the methodology of the righteous early generations. For it is difficult—if not impossible—for a doctor who has perfected his own craft to be simultaneously versed in the Qur’an and Sunnah and proficient in deriving their legal rulings.