The Sixth Stage: Stagnation and Decline
The Mongols, led by Genghis Khan and his children, reached the heart of the Muslim Empire. The last Abbasid Caliph was assassinated, the libraries burnt down, and the scholars massacred. This came as a shock to the Muslims, and was a very painful period for the Ummah.
During this period of instability, people were wondering what to do and how to handle the situation. The commoner began to start making Ijtihad. When the scholars saw this, they closed the door to Ijtihad, preventing these people from introducing their ideas without solid foundation. This is one of the reasons blind following became the rule of the day during this period. There was no room for reason and people just followed.
With blind following becoming the norm, switching Madh'habs became forbidden. The consequence of doing so would be trial, punishment, or even prison. It was considered a sin.
The Madh'habs became virtually different religions and it was during this period where you had the phenomena of individual prayer places being set around the Ka'bah, one for each school of thought.
During this period of instability, people were wondering what to do and how to handle the situation. The commoner began to start making Ijtihad. When the scholars saw this, they closed the door to Ijtihad, preventing these people from introducing their ideas without solid foundation. This is one of the reasons blind following became the rule of the day during this period. There was no room for reason and people just followed.
With blind following becoming the norm, switching Madh'habs became forbidden. The consequence of doing so would be trial, punishment, or even prison. It was considered a sin.
The Madh'habs became virtually different religions and it was during this period where you had the phenomena of individual prayer places being set around the Ka'bah, one for each school of thought.
This period was also the time when the well known Hanafi ruling that a Hanafi wasn't allowed to marry a Shafi'i was instituted. A later on Hanafi scholar then made the ruling that Hanafis could marry Shafi'i women, treating them like People of the Book.
This ruling arose from a very trivial issue: The issue of the acceptability of making an exception in a statement of faith.
i.e. According to the Hanafis, if someone asked you if you are a believer, your answer must be "Yes, I am a believer" whereas the Shafi'is held that it was permissible for you to say, "I'm a believer, Inshallah"
The argument of the Hanafis was that saying Inshallah implies uncertainty about your faith, and certainty is a condition for its validity. This is an Aqeedah issue that came out of the philosophical court debates and spread into Fiqh.
The fact of the matter is that the Prophet taught Ayesha to pray for the dead when we go to graveyards saying:
And there is no certainty like the certainty of death.
The Mongols were eventually absorbed into the Muslim state, as after gaining control, they needed people to help them administer it. The Muslim Empire was far more advanced than the Mongols, who came from a nomadic desert style life. They thus hired many Muslim administrators and scholars of various fields and eventually the message of Islam reached the Mongolian leadership and of the grandchildren of Genghis Khan are people who converted to Islam. It then stretched to India and became what was known as the Mughal Empire which ruled India for 1000 years after that.
But as a consequence of their sacking of Baghdad the whole body of Fiqh and their scholars were at a state of disarray. So many books were burnt and so many scholars were killed, the remaining scholars found it necessary to preserve the Fiqh from ignorants abusing it, and they spoke out against Ijtihad of the Madhhab which had existed in the latter 300 years of the Abbasid Era.
This is not to say there were no scholars who opposed this. Ibn Taymiyah, who was from the latter part of the 13th Century spoke out against blind following and he had generations of students who came after him who kept the concept of Ijtihad alive. They continued to make rulings, and became unpopular for it. There were even rulings made against them declaring them apostates. Ibn Taymiya was jailed and passed away there. The overall characteristic of this era was one of blind following.
This doesn't negate the fact that scholars have to follow scholars before them. No one can sit down and consider himself independent from the previous scholars, unless he's deviated. This has to be maintained in order to preserve the authentic character of the body of Islam. It is through this we are able to link ourselves to the original message. When you completely start to do your own thing, the original message is lost, like what happened with Christianity.
But what happened was that the Madh'hab became equivalent to Islam itself. They became divinely ordained representatives of Islam, each one equal to the other in theory, each one correct in and of itself, and each one obligatory to be followed for a persons Islam to be valid. One who didn’t follow a Madh’hab was considered an apostate while one who shifted from Madh’hab to Madh’hab was considered a sinner who would be punished and lashed by the Judge. This period lasted for 700 years, bringing us up to the present.
This doesn't negate the fact that scholars have to follow scholars before them. No one can sit down and consider himself independent from the previous scholars, unless he's deviated. This has to be maintained in order to preserve the authentic character of the body of Islam. It is through this we are able to link ourselves to the original message. When you completely start to do your own thing, the original message is lost, like what happened with Christianity.
But what happened was that the Madh'hab became equivalent to Islam itself. They became divinely ordained representatives of Islam, each one equal to the other in theory, each one correct in and of itself, and each one obligatory to be followed for a persons Islam to be valid. One who didn’t follow a Madh’hab was considered an apostate while one who shifted from Madh’hab to Madh’hab was considered a sinner who would be punished and lashed by the Judge. This period lasted for 700 years, bringing us up to the present.
If you don’t follow any particular Math’hab you are labelled a Wahhabi or AhlalHadeeth (because the same movement against blind following developed in India and Pakistan under this heading – Those who gave precedence to Hadith over Madh’habism)
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