Stagnation and Decline: Factors that led to Madh'hab Dominance

1)   During the latter part of the Abbasid Era, when the state was crumbling and the ministers took over (some of them Shiites) the care and concern for Fiqh was lost and shifted towards political control, and Islamic law wasn’t given precedence as it was in the vibrant era of the early Abbasids. 

2)    With the crumbling of the Islamic state, many mini states arose.    

   The other areas that weren't under the control of the Mongols developed under separate states ruled by their own Madh'habs. Anybody in that area who was trained in another Math’hab had to take on the Madh’hab of his state if he wanted a position.

3)  Due to the decline in the care and concern for Fiqh, no one was willing to study the huge texts. In order to promote Fiqh to some degree,the Scholars of this era began the process of condensing these major works.

After they brought them down in size, abridgments were made. Some scholars went on to reducing them to poetry. You could memorize the whole of a Madh’hab in a thousand lines of poetry. What happened was that in order to make these texts rhyme and easy to memorize, the poet scholars would use obscure Arabic terms and grammatical constructions which were not in common use and the students of that time ended up being stuck with a set of riddles. The process of explaining these lines of poetry then began. These were usually without evidence; just clarification and general indications.

What we can see here is that no one is going back to the original – the Qur’an and Sunnah. You saw a process of compilation, reduction, and now explanation, all away from the basic evidences. Lots of people memorized these works but didn’t understand the sources of these rulings anymore. They knew the ruling but weren’t concerned with the evidence.

3)    The door of Ijtihad was closed due to the danger of the commoners changing the religion with their rulings. 

   All the Madh’hab details were worked out and speculative Fiqh had reached its peak, and the door of Ijtihad was closed, so there was no room for thinking anymore. It was just learning about what was in the past and regurgitating it.

When the scholars who taught at this time came to the area of Ijtihad they would set a series of conditions for its application. When you look at these conditions, many of which are still taught today, you'll find that they're so stringent that even the companions of the Prophet couldn't meet them. 

Usool al Fiqh was taught for the sake of knowledge for their Madh’hab and not for the scholars to utilize these principles and come up with new rulings.

What we find then is the books of Fiqh, as the era continued, though they may even bring some of the arguments of other schools, were established to re-affirm the rulings of their own school. Other rulings were criticized, attacked, and put down, and their own schools rulings promoted.

In the Ottoman Empire in the 19^th Century an attempt was made to codify Islamic law so that it could be more accessible to the administration of the Islamic state. It was completed in 1876 and was enforced as law for the Ottoman Empire. It was called, “The Just Codes”

In spite of this great effort, and it is to be commended, the problem which arose was that it was the product of blind following. They only chose scholars of the Hanafi Madh’hab to codify the law, which was the official Madh’hab of the Ottoman Empire. It ignored all the rulings of the other schools and didn’t serve the purpose it could have in re-promoting Islamic law at a time when various parts of the Muslim world had begun to accept Roman, Greek, British, French law into their system.

From 1492, The fall of Spain, the ascendancy of European colonization began after driving Muslims out of Europe. They began to take different parts of Africa, Asia, the South East (Indonesia, Philippines, etc) and to establish their rule and legal systems.

Muslims, in order to keep up with the developments taking place around them absorbed European laws into their legal system.

Throughout the Muslim realm Islamic law is being reduced more and more to issues merely concerning marriage, divorce, inheritance.

It is only in Saudi Arabia where the official Shari’ah is enforced according to the Hanbali madh’hab, Pakistan where the Hanafi Madh’hab is enforced, the Ja'fari in Iran, and the Maliki in Sudan. 

The vast majority of others utilized French, German, and other codes to govern their countries. This is the legacy us Muslims are living today.