The core
These two Arabic terms name the deepest structural question in Islamic intellectual history — and, Tadreej argues, in Pakistan’s contemporary condition.
Ijtihad (اجتهاد) means independent reasoning from first principles. Derived from the root j-h-d(to exert effort), it describes the act of a qualified thinker engaging directly with foundational sources — the Qur’an, the Prophetic tradition, the observable world — to arrive at a judgement that no prior authority has settled. Ijtihad is not rebellion against tradition. It is the tradition’s own mechanism for remaining alive: the means by which inherited knowledge meets new circumstances and produces new understanding.
Taqlid(تقلید) means following the judgement of another without independently examining the evidence. The word carries connotations of imitation, of wearing another’s garment. In its original legal context, taqlid described the reasonable practice of a non-specialist deferring to a qualified jurist — much as a patient defers to a physician. The problem was never deference itself. The problem arose when deference became the default posture of an entire civilisation, and when the institutional conditions that produced qualified independent thinkers gradually ceased to exist.
The historical arc
In the first centuries of Islamic civilisation, ijtihad was the norm. The founders of the four Sunni legal schools — Abu Hanifa, Malik, al-Shafi’i, Ahmad ibn Hanbal — were themselves mujtahids: independent reasoners who disagreed with one another openly, developed competing methodologies, and understood their conclusions as provisional human efforts, not final divine rulings. The intellectual culture they inhabited treated disagreement (ikhtilaf) as a sign of vitality, not of disorder.
What happened next is one of the most consequential developments in Islamic intellectual history. By roughly the tenth century, a consensus emerged — among jurists, not among the sources themselves — that the essential questions of Islamic law had been answered. The “gate of ijtihad” was declared effectively closed. Future scholars were to operate within the established schools, applying precedent rather than reasoning independently. Taqlid became not merely a practical convenience but an institutional expectation.
The consequences compounded over centuries. The skills required for ijtihad — direct engagement with sources, comfort with ambiguity, the capacity to reason across disciplines — atrophied as the demand for them diminished. Legal education became the transmission of established positions rather than the cultivation of independent analytical capacity. And because Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) was deeply intertwined with theology, philosophy, and governance, the closure rippled outward: the habit of deferring to received authority became generalised across intellectual life.
This narrative is contested. Some historians argue that ijtihad never truly ceased — that creative legal reasoning continued under other names, that individual scholars exercised independent judgement even while formally operating within taqlid frameworks. This is partially true, and the corrective matters. But the structural point stands: the institutional incentives shifted decisively toward reproduction of inherited positions and away from the cultivation of independent reasoning as a widespread capacity.
Iqbal’s intervention
Muhammad Iqbal made the recovery of ijtihad the central demand of his intellectual project. In the sixth lecture of The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, titled “The Principle of Movement in the Structure of Islam,” he argued that ijtihad is not a historical curiosity but a permanent feature of Islamic civilisation’s design — a built-in mechanism for renewal that was suppressed, not exhausted.
But Iqbal’s argument went beyond the legal domain. He treated the ijtihad-taqlid distinction as a diagnosis of civilisational condition. A society practising ijtihad is one that engages with reality directly, produces its own knowledge, and takes responsibility for its own judgements. A society practising taqlid — in law, in education, in governance, in its relationship to foreign development models — is one that has outsourced its thinking and, with it, its agency. The Qur’anic term for this condition is khudi in its negative form: the self that has not yet awakened to its owncapacity.
Relationship to Western philosophy
The ijtihad-taqlid distinction resonates with several currents in Western thought, though the parallels are instructive rather than exact.
The most obvious resonance is with the Enlightenment ideal of intellectual autonomy. Kant’s famous injunction sapere aude— “dare to know” — and his definition of Enlightenment as the emergence from “self-incurred immaturity” describe a condition remarkably similar to what Iqbal diagnoses as civilisational taqlid. In both cases, the pathology is not ignorance but the habit of deferring to authority when one possesses the capacity to reason independently. And in both cases, the prescription is not the rejection of all authority but the insistence that authority must be earned through reasoning, not merely inherited through tradition.
The divergence, however, is significant. Enlightenment autonomy, particularly in its later secular forms, tends toward the individual as the ultimate epistemic authority — the lone reasoner who submits all claims to the tribunal of personal judgement. Ijtihad operates within a textual and communal tradition. The mujtahid does not reason from a blank slate; they reason from within a relationship to revelation, to the Prophetic example, and to a cumulative scholarly tradition. The independence is real, but it is independence within commitment, not independence fromit. This distinction matters enormously for understanding what Iqbal is calling for: not a Muslim Enlightenment that replaces tradition with individual reason, but the reactivation of tradition’s own internal mechanism for self-renewal.
A second parallel lies in pragmatism— the philosophical tradition of William James and John Dewey, both of whom Iqbal read and engaged with. Pragmatism insists that ideas must be tested against their consequences, that inquiry is an ongoing social activity rather than a solitary pursuit of fixed truths, and that the worst intellectual sin is the premature closure of questions. Iqbal’s conception of ijtihad shares this anti-dogmatic spirit, and his argument that each generation must re-engage with foundational questions echoes Dewey’s insistence that democracy depends on the continuous reconstruction of experience.
A third, more uncomfortable parallel exists with postcolonial theory— particularly the critique of epistemological dependency, in which formerly colonised societies continue to import intellectual frameworks from their former colonisers long after political independence. Taqlid, in Iqbal’s expanded sense, describes precisely this condition: a society that has internalised the habit of receiving its categories of thought from elsewhere. The difference is that Iqbal’s diagnosis predates postcolonial theory by decades, arises from within the Islamic tradition rather than from Western critical theory, and proposes a constructive programme (ijtihad) rather than primarily a critique.
Why this matters
This is the concept at the centre of everything Tadreej is trying to build.
Pakistan’s condition — in education, in governance, in economic policy, in the production of knowledge — can be described with precision as institutionalised taqlid. The country’s universities operate on curricula designed elsewhere and reproduced locally without critical adaptation. Its policy frameworks are imported from international development organisations and implemented without the analytical infrastructure to evaluate whether they fit Pakistani conditions. Its religious institutions transmit inherited rulings to congregations trained to receive them without question. Even its reform movements tend to follow templates — borrowed from Silicon Valley, from Singapore, from the Gulf — rather than reasoning from Pakistani realities toward Pakistani solutions.
This is not a moral failure. It is a structural one. The institutional conditions that would produce widespread ijtihad — an education system that cultivates independent reasoning, a research culture that rewards original inquiry, a public sphere in which disagreement is treated as productive rather than dangerous — do not yet exist at the scale Pakistan requires. Individual mujtahids exist in abundance: brilliant, independent-minded Pakistanis who reason with rigour and originality, often in isolation, often abroad. What does not exist is the institutional ecosystem that would make their capacity the norm rather than the exception.
This is why Tadreej’s Seven Capacities framework begins with Historical and Philosophical Grounding and Critical Reasoning before it reaches any applied discipline. The capacities are, taken together, the infrastructure of ijtihad — the intellectual equipment a person needs to engage with foundational questions directly rather than deferring to the nearest available authority. And the Seven Dispositions — curiosity, resilience, humility, empathy — describe the character of a society in which ijtihad is practised responsibly: not as arrogance, but as the honest exercise of a God-given faculty that demands cultivation.
Iqbal did not merely recommend ijtihad. He demanded that a people build the conditions under which it becomes possible. That demand is unanswered. Tadreej exists to begin answering it.
Connections
Related pages
Appears in
Lecture I (Section 1) · Lecture II (Section 1) · Lecture VI (throughout)
Further reading
- Wael Hallaq, Was the Gate of Ijtihad Closed? (International Journal of Middle East Studies, 1984)
- Muhammad Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, Lecture VI
- Ahmad Dallal, Islam Without Europe, Chapters 1–3