I read this interesting article on a website called “New Civilisation” about Ijtihad, the process of extracting new rules from Islamic fiqh after analysing the current reality. The article explains that one of the reasons why the Muslims declined under the last Khilafah (Caliphate) was because the Ottoman turks stopped the process of Ijtihad, they banned things like the Printing press and the telephone because they could not or would not reconcile these new devices with Islamic evidences and thought they were haraam. This is not the case and had they done Ijithad properly, they could have resolved these problems.
all (most) the maulvi type believe that the doors of ijtehad closed after the first 200-300yrs after the Prophets death (PBUH), sometime after the famous schools of islam were established..
doesn't really sound right to me, but you have to be a scholar in Islamic sciences, to do ijtihad ... and I don't think we have that many around in our times.
Welcome the board discourse.
I beleive this is Islam's stength and islam's weakness. Although we may have many qualified people to sort out virtually every problem we are encountering with religion these days. It is unfortunate that we don't have a central place to come together and come to a conclusion about issues. Therefore, Ijthaad isn't implemented as it should