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Those who succumbed to the temptation forfeited the respect of the circle to which they had belonged. I once witnessed a case of this kind, and the former friends of the qadhi did not spare him their bitter reproaches. He remarked that the judge, whose duty it was to maintain the divine law, verily held a noble office.
Amongst the other state officials the title of qadhi may count as a spiritual one, and the public may to a certain extent share this reverence; but in the eyes of the pious and of the canonists such glory is only reflected from the clerical robe, in which the worldling disguises himself. To the mufti criticism is somewhat more favourable than to the qadhi.
The temptation is by no means so great as that to which the qadhi is exposed; especially since the office of judge has become an article of commerce, so that the very first step towards the possession of it is in the direction of Hell.
In such cases it is better to be armed beforehand with an expert opinion than to be exposed to dangerous criticism which might find an echo in a wide circle. The official mufti must therefore be somewhat pliable, to say the least. Moreover, any private person has the right to put questions to the state mufti; and the qadhi court is bound to take his answers into account in its decisions.
On this account, the canonists, although it was from their ranks that the officials of the qadhi court were to be drawn, considered no words too strong to express their contempt for the office of qadhi. In handbooks of the Law of all times, the qadhis "of our time" are represented as unscrupulous beings, whose unreliable judgments were chiefly dictated by their greed.
Moreover in "these degenerate times" which have existed for about ten centuries the acceptance of an appointment to the function of qadhi is not regarded as a duty, while a competent scholar may only refuse to give a fatwa under exceptional circumstances. Still, an unusually strong character is needed by the mufti, if he is not to fall into the snares of the world.
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