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Updated: May 1, 2025
A vast change has come upon Mohammedan thought since its last legal Mujtahed wrote his last legal opinion; and what was true of orthodox Islam fifty and even twenty years ago is no longer true now.
It is a maxim with Mussulmans of all sects that prayer is not valid if made in another man's house without his permission, and this being so, and the Shah admitting that his palaces of right belong not to himself but to the Móhdy, he is obliged to lease them according to legal form from an alem or mujtahed, acting for the supposed Móhdy, before he can pray in them to his spiritual profit.
The Turkish Ulema have always insisted strongly on the dogma that the ijtahad, that is to say the elaboration of new doctrine, is absolutely closed; that nothing can be added to or taken away from the already existing body of religious law, and that no new mujtahed, or doctor of Islam, can be expected who shall adapt that law to the life of the modern world.
Since we are imagining many things we may imagine this one too, that our Caliph of the Koreysh, chosen by the faithful and installed at Mecca, should invite the Ulema of every land to a council at the time of the pilgrimage, and there, appointing a new Mujtahed, should propound to them certain modifications of the Sheriat, as things necessary to the welfare of Islam, and deducible from tradition.
The reform preached by Abd el Wahhab was radical. He began by breaking with the maxim held by the mass of the orthodox that inquiry on matters of faith was closed. He constituted himself a new mujtahed and founded a new school, neither Hanafite, Malekite, nor Shafite, and called it the school of the Unitarians, Muwaheddin, a name still cherished by the Wahhabites.
With the Shafites there is a disposition to widen rather than to narrow the area of theology. The Hanefites and Malekites proclaim loudly that inquiry has been closed and change is impossible, but the Shafites are inclined to seek a new mujtahed who shall reconcile Islam with the modern conditions of the world.
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