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Transcript
This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings. I have the task of explaining and solving all difference of opinion within the next 15 minutes, insha'Allah. First of all, why do we want to talk about the subject of difference of opinion? Two basic reasons. One is, as Yaqeen Institute is addressing different questions that people have, different doubts and sources of confusion, invariably we're going to have to decide what are acceptable answers and what are not acceptable answers, because there's going to be lots of different potential ways that people say, oh, you can interpret the text this way or that way. So part of this is already going to be part of the process of selecting reasonable answers and putting them out there. The second aspect is difference of opinion in and of itself can also be a source of doubt for people. So many people may come up to you and say, you know, why are there so many conflicting answers about a single topic in Islam? Why is it that this scholar says one thing and that scholar says another thing? How do we actually solve that and understand that? First of all, let's start with some basic questions about Islam and then work our way up to more complex topics in difference of opinion. So the basic understanding, you know, if somebody thinks about the meaning of Islam itself, right, we all know that it's a submission to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. And so right from the get-go, when we look at the concept of Islam, we understand that that means that we're striving as believers to do what Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala wants us to do. We're striving to follow the guidance that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala has revealed in the Quran and as it was explained by the Prophet Muhammad salallahu alayhi wa sallam. So right from the outset, we can exclude approaches to Islam that are postmodernist in nature in the sense that they view the answer as something that you invent rather than discover. We believe that the Quran is communicating a message to us. And the job of scholars of Islam is to study, analyze the text in order to extract and understand what that message is rather than, you know, somebody saying, well, Islam can be whatever you want it to be, right?
Because if you make Islam infinitely malleable, then Islam can, you know, then a person can say that the concept of Islam itself becomes meaningless, right? If you can call everything peanut butter, then what is peanut butter, right? It loses its own meaning. So the first question that we often have is why doesn't Islam have a central authority, right? Why don't we have like a big boss at the top, a CEO, a Pope, a president who just says, okay, no difference of opinion on this. This is the final answer. So the first misconception that we have to clarify is that Islam is not a human institution that has somebody making a decision at the top of the scheme. If we look at Islam instead through the analogy of other academic disciplines, we understand that the correct answer is not based on what one person decides or what one institution decides, but it's based on knowledge and understanding and research from the Quran and the Sunnah of the Prophet Muhammad Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. So when you're talking about mathematics or medicine or science or physics, any of these other academic fields, you don't say, you know, who's the guy who gets to decide what the right answer is? The right answer is based on those people who have expertise in the field, conducting their research, and then coming to a conclusion based on that. And, you know, on the issue of why do we even have this, the scholars of Islam point out, it goes back to the origin story of human beings, right? Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala created Adam and he favored Adam over the angels with the gift of what? Knowledge, right? So as human beings, Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala has given us certain things in the Sharia that are qat'iyat, right? They are definitively established. They're not subject to interpretation. Whereas there are other things that Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala has deliberately left that are subject to interpretation
so that scholars can exercise their reason and their intellect in applying the guidance of Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala to the physical world. So here's a picture. Everybody look at this picture. And I want you to shout out what you think this picture is showing. Sorry? A brain? Anyone else? Yes? A chest cavity? Okay. At least we got the right body part. So it is the chest. The lungs? Okay, good. So the reason why I show this, so this is a CT scan of the chest and this patient has a blood clot in their pulmonary artery, in the artery that supplies the lung. And this is a lethal condition. If this patient is not treated, they can die. And anyone who's properly trained can look at this and give you one right answer. This is a qat'iy issue for somebody who has the proper knowledge. But, you know, for an average person, they will look at this and somebody might shout out, this is the brain, this is the leg, this is whatever, because they don't have the familiarity. So things may be crystal clear to somebody with the adequate expertise, but they may not be crystal clear to somebody who has not studied extensively. Whereas there are other things that everybody should be able to recognize. So here you can see there's a hand and it's an x-ray of the hand and the fingers are missing. But this is something that is analogous to ma'loom min ad-deen bid-daroora. Anyone looking at this image can see something basic like that, right? You can see that there's fingers missing. So there's certain things in Islamic sciences that everybody should be able to recognize. They're, you know, obvious to anyone with basic familiarity with the Islamic teachings. So understanding that, we can answer some of these following questions. So are there different opinions on everything? And the answer is no. Like any academic discipline, there's going to be some things that are fundamentals, that are usool,
that are not open to interpretation, and there are some things that are furoor, you know, subsidiary issues which are subject to interpretation and require expertise in order to come to an answer. And then the question of why didn't God tell us everything explicitly, as we mentioned, because Islam is a deen that favors knowledge and favors the exercise of human reasoning in its understanding and application. Is difference of opinion bad? There's a beautiful narration in which Imam Ahmed bin Hanbal was told that somebody had compiled a book of differences and they called it Kitab al-Ikhtilaf. And he said instead you should call it Kitab al-Si'ah. Instead of calling it the book of differences, you should call it the book of capacity or flexibility. So when we talk about differences of opinion, we can categorize them broadly into two different categories. Qawl al-mu'tabir and ghayr al-mu'tabir. So you can talk about valid or invalid differences of opinion. And the valid differences of opinion are going to be determined based on the scriptural strength of support that they have from the Qur'an and Sunnah according to the proper methodology. So like any academic field, there's going to be certain differences of opinion that are valid. As a medical doctor, if a patient has an infection, we may disagree on the best course of antibiotics to treat this particular infection. But we may agree that surgery would not be a reasonable option at all. Whereas somebody outside of the field without the adequate expertise, that might not be obvious to them. So there's going to be some issues that people, even though it's categorized as a binary, it's obviously a spectrum. So people are going to tend to agree more on some issues. And then as you start mentioning other issues, it's going to start pushing away from the valid and it's going to kind of go towards weaker and weaker and weaker until it becomes an opinion that pretty much everybody concludes is invalid.
So there is going to be a spectrum of opinion in the middle. So what makes an opinion invalid? So differences between valid and invalid opinions. Scholars of Islam have classically talked about this, right? So Abu Ishaq al-Shatibi, who died 790 Hijri, the author of the famous Muwafakat, who did a lot of discussion on the concept of maqasas sharia, the objectives of Islamic law. He talks about how a valid opinion is one in which it has been derived from the text of the Qur'an and the Sunnah, using the principles of the Arabic language, using a methodology that is familiar to all scholars of Islam called Usul al-Fiqh. Whereas an invalid opinion is one in which a person is using something that is not recognized as an acceptable source of law. For example, somebody may say, well I like this opinion because it agrees with Western liberalism. And so I'm willing to disregard any scriptural proofs to the contrary because I've already concluded that this is the opinion that I'm going to follow. And so that's not going to be a valid methodology. So the corollary of that is that you can have two people say the exact same answer, but one of them is advocating it based on a correct methodology, and based on a sound understanding of interpretation of text from the Qur'an and the hadith. And the other person is advocating it based on just saying, well you know what, I want to reject this hadith, or I don't want to accept that verse, and I want to just go with this because it's more convenient, or it agrees with personal desires, or it agrees with the favorite ideology of the day. So there's many works of scholars that have talked about what are the conditions for things to be considered a valid or invalid opinion. And just to look at one example from the work Ikhtilaf al-Muftiyin, five conditions that are mentioned here. Number one, the person who the opinion is coming from. It has to be from a qualified scholar.
It has to be from somebody with proper credentials. If you want a surgery, if you want an appendectomy, you're not going to go to somebody on the street and tell them, you know, can you grab a kitchen knife and do your job, right? You're going to go to somebody who's graduated from a sound educational institute, and part of that is also peer recognition, right? Other people in the field who have expertise, they recognize one another, and that's why in different disciplines we often have the formalization of that peer recognition through the form of colleges, right? So in Canada we have, for example, the College of Physicians and Surgeons of each province that is responsible for saying, oh, you know, if this person, if this physician is doing something that is not credible, or if they're violating, you know, the responsibilities of a physician, then we can actually revoke that person's license. So there's that kind of peer recognition that's important as well. Secondly, an opinion that a person is presenting does not contradict the consensus of scholars. And we always have to be careful about that one because sometimes there may be things that are hastily reported as consensus, but on further examination there isn't actually a consensus, and we find that early on there were dissenting views on some of those topics. Thirdly, that it does not lack precedent in the tradition. Fourthly, that it does not arise from an unacceptable source, something that is not considered a source of Islamic law. And fifthly, that it does not contradict unequivocal evidence from the Qur'an and Sunnah. So qualified scholarship beyond just the academic qualifications, Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal mentions in a beautiful narration that Ibn al-Qayyim, may Allah have mercy on him, comments on in I'lam al-Muwaqqa'in. He talks about some of the other aspects of somebody who is a qualified scholar, somebody with sincere intentions, spiritual integrity, independence from others, right? Rather than just being, you know, directly under the influence of a particular organization or group or political government,
where everything they're saying is just to appease the rulers. Fourthly, academic expertise. And fifthly, familiarity with the situation of the people that they're dealing with. So this is something interesting as well. Some of the scholars of Islam also mentioned, for example, the famous Hanafi jurist Ibn Abidin. He mentioned that just as the ignorant physician is barred from practice, so too should the unfit scholar be barred from practice. So they had this notion that, you know, some of the scholars said, like a half scholar is more dangerous than a half physician, right? Somebody who's unqualified, there should be some restrictions by others put in place that prevent them from being a source of misguidance. Similarly, the Hanbali scholar Ibn al-Najjar, he mentioned is the responsibility of the legislative authorities to ban unknown and ignorant scholars from issuing fatwa. And obviously in the digital age, this is not something that becomes feasible. So people are exposed to all these conflicting sources of misinformation, so it's important for the credible community leaders to address that. Because if you can't prevent others from being a source of misinformation, then you have to clarify and contextualize that misinformation. And some of the scholars, for example, Badr al-Din al-Zarkishi has a work on Usul al-Farq called Bahru al-Murheed. And in this work, he actually mentions that many of the scholars actually talked about having examinations for people before they give fatwa as well. So just like, you know, you have to pass a licensing exam for many different professions, the same concept was mentioned for scholars of jurisprudence. And one of the examples that they give to substantiate that is that Ali ibn Abi Talib radiyallahu anhu was once walking
and he saw Hassan al-Basri rahimahullah sitting and speaking in his halaqa, and he actually asked him some questions. And then when he was satisfied with the answers that Imam Hassan al-Basri gave, he mentioned, now you can continue to lecture now as you please. So another fundamental concept is, if you're looking at an opinion, something that any lay person should be able to realize is that there's fundamental values in Islam. And so somebody comes up with a new opinion that contradicts those fundamental values, you can easily recognize that this is not going to be something Islamic, no matter what kind of contrived interpretation that they use. And so one example that everybody knows is the example, if somebody gives an opinion that contradicts Tawheed, for example, and they say, well, you know, there's actually more than one God or whatever, right? Anyone's going to say, well, okay, this clearly contradicts the very basis of Islamic theology. And because it does that, anyone is able to say that's something that goes against what is ma'noom min al-deen bidh dharurah, something that is known by necessity to be from the Islamic faith. So similarly, Ibn al-Qayyim rahimahullah mentions in his work, I'lam al-muqqayyin, he mentions that the shari'ah, the Islamic legal system, is in its entirety justice, compassion, and wisdom, and therefore anything which contradicts that, such as cruelty, harm, or foolishness, nonsense, can never be claimed to be part of the shari'ah, no matter what interpretations attempt to do so. So what about tradition? Do we need to quote scholars from the past in order to prove an opinion? Does it matter what the Muslim ummah for centuries believed? So the logic of tradition is very, very strong. If, you know, thousands and thousands of scholars throughout the history of the ummah have been saying that this is the correct answer,
and suddenly I come along and I say, well, all of these guys got it wrong, and I'm the first one who came up with the right answer, I have to have a pretty good explanation for why that answer was not obvious to all these people who came before me, right? So that's the basic logic of following the tradition. Scholars from all different schools of thought express this. So Ibn Taymiyyah, rahim Allah, mentions that any religious opinion from someone later, from someone who came afterwards, that was not arrived at by anyone before that person, is considered an error, as Imam Ahmed ibn Hanbal said, that beware of speaking on a matter with something that lacks precedent. And same thing was mentioned by the scholars of the four madhahib, and Imam Abul Hasan al-Ashari mentioned the same thing as well. So it goes across different schools of law and schools of thought. Now Ibn al-Qayyim, rahim Allah, mentions a very interesting point. He says, it's important to know that an opinion that is rejected because it lacks precedent is one pertaining to an issue that emerged during the early generations, which they passed their verdicts on, and then someone comes later with a new opinion. So it's not going to be something that never existed before, or there's new information now that wasn't accessible before. In those situations where there's new information that wasn't accessible before, then obviously somebody is going to have a justification to say, this is where we have to actually revisit this issue. And so there's one example that I'll just mention about this, and this is something, a phenomenon that's known to scholars of Islam. It's called, taghayir al-fatwa bi taghayir al-zaman wal-makan. The changing of a legal ruling based on the changing of time and place, based on the changing of circumstances. So Imam al-Sarraqsi, one of the great Hanafi jurists, he mentions that the differences between Imam Abu Hanifa and his companions, Abu Yusuf and Muhammad ibn Hassan Shaybani, that the majority of those differences were not ikhtilaf, hujjatin, wa burhan.
They were not differences based on their different understandings of proofs and evidences, walakin ikhtilaf wa asrin wa zaman. Rather they were differences based on the differences in their time period. So if that's the difference you can have between one generation, between Abu Hanifa and his companions, what about differences that happen after the Industrial Revolution, after there's so many different changes in society. So those are the issues that scholars have leeway to investigate further. There's more that can be said but inshallah we'll get into some of the issues in the Q&A. Jazakumullah.
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