a rolling stone gathers some mossy – on taqlid, talfiq, switching madhhabs, etc.

[eTeacher]

Jazakumullah Br. Ibn Ajiba for taking the time out to share your knowledge with us. May Allah increase you in knowledge and wisdom.

[salman]

Sallam

Amazing, well worth the read. Jazakallah : )

[AbuZayd]

Assalamu alaykum,

I am sorry, I have been unable to read the entire thread - though I tried but I would just like to make one comment on one of the articles linked to the lightstudy website.

Yes, we are ignorant. But, we do not wish to remain that way. Alhamdolillah I do my best to follow the Hanafi Madhab in most of my fiqh. The one thing that I think has helped people such as myself whose grasp of Arabic is basic (and always seems to be just "slowly improving" is books such as that by Shaykh AbdurRahman ibn Yusuf, Shaykh Riyadh ul Haq and others where some of the thought behind the rulings of our Madhab and the evidences they are based on are detailed. In this current day such works are extremely important and I think that this is a good by product of the Salafi onslaught on the lay person for daleel. Sure, reading such books do not make me a Mujtahid but neither am I so thick that I cannot at least get a basic grasp of what the Mujtahid may have been thinking. Maybe this is not necessary but being a Medic myself I don't mind my patients asking for information on a procedure they are about to endure at my hands - I don't expect them to "fully" understand but at least they are no longer in the dark.

May Allah swt help our Shuyukh in producing more works such as fiqh al imam and others like these for the Muslims living in the West....and may he increase us all in knowledge.

Wasalam.

[Strive4Allah]

Assalamu alaykum,

I am sorry, I have been unable to read the entire thread - though I tried but I would just like to make one comment on one of the articles linked to the lightstudy website.

Yes, we are ignorant. But, we do not wish to remain that way. Alhamdolillah I do my best to follow the Hanafi Madhab in most of my fiqh. The one thing that I think has helped people such as myself whose grasp of Arabic is basic (and always seems to be just "slowly improving" is books such as that by Shaykh AbdurRahman ibn Yusuf, Shaykh Riyadh ul Haq and others where some of the thought behind the rulings of our Madhab and the evidences they are based on are detailed. In this current day such works are extremely important and I think that this is a good by product of the Salafi onslaught on the lay person for daleel. Sure, reading such books do not make me a Mujtahid but neither am I so thick that I cannot at least get a basic grasp of what the Mujtahid may have been thinking. Maybe this is not necessary but being a Medic myself I don't mind my patients asking for information on a procedure they are about to endure at my hands - I don't expect them to "fully" understand but at least they are no longer in the dark.

May Allah swt help our Shuyukh in producing more works such as fiqh al imam and others like these for the Muslims living in the West....and may he increase us all in knowledge.

Wasalam.

thats good mashallah
btw i tried to read this post so many times the top one but i coulndt just read it seeing how long it was...

[Hard2Hit]

Again, the brother was trying to compare the practices of la-madhabis to talfiq. He came up with many linguistic arguments to get us thinking as to how both of them are different and essentially, what are, or should be, the prerequisites of talfiq.

It got me thinking that whenever our salafi bretheren question taqlid of only one imam, we not only answer them accordingly but many among us also ask them in return:

1] Do you have ample grasp on arabic to go to the original text and then judge that which ruling seems 'ahsan' to you.

1] Do you have knowledge of hadith science so that you can pick and choose from rulings of different madhaib on any matter.

1] Have you studied all the works previously done on the matters of deen.

etc.

Then how come those questions simply get waived for us muqallids? Dont we need to be proficient in 'serf-o-nahav', hadith science, works of fiqh etc to be able to follow a ruling from different madhab? If yes then shouldn't only the scholars practice talfiq because commoners like myself can not spend that many 'years' to 'dedicatedly' study the deen?

If some commoner still practices talfiq, what would be his default madhab when he was originally, lets say, Maliki, and then after few years of choosing from madhaib [in separate practices], 51% of his religious practices were hanafi and 49% Maliki? How do we even measure such percentage and whats the threshold for default madhab automatically (if ever) getting switched if the percentage exceeds a certain limit?

Essentially, are you guys thinking that all this fiqh speak has driven me crazy?