The ruling on imitation in Islamic law

Abstract

God Almighty has revealed the laws for people to follow in order to succeed in this world and be saved in the hereafter. The Islamic law is the final law that will be suitable for people until the Day of Resurrection. This is due to a great characteristic that God Almighty has given this law, which is stability and flexibility. Stability in terms of origins and sources,and chivalry in the rulings that take into account the conditions of people and their times, so Islamic jurisprudence with its principles that deal directly with the sources of legislation and its branches that are represented in the rulings of Sharia that are reached by applying those principles

Thus, since the era of the Companions, the Followers, and those who followed them, the jurists have been striving, using the science of the principles of jurisprudence, in order to arrive at branches that were compatible with their social conditions at that time, until the light of ijtihad faded, and that was with the middle of the fourth century AH, when imitation appeared, which limited the science of the principles of jurisprudence and prevented the use of reason in deduction from the principles of this Sharia. The glue was that people relied on the sayings of the predecessors, never departing from them, despite the predecessors themselves denying this tradition. Therefore, we will present the issue of tradition and the scholars' opinions on it, along with an explanation of the negative effects of this phenomenon, through this research.