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The Gates of Ijtihad THE GATES OF IJTIHAD Intellectual Freedom a

Dunlop, 1971, p. 203).

Related to political fragmentation is economic fragmentation. Classical Islam was an urban, commercial civilization; both intra-Islamic political strife and external invasion (by Turks and Crusaders, and later by the Mongols) broke trade links and caused economic decline of cities across the Muslim world (Lombard, 1975, p. 10).

The most popular cause given for Islamic decline, at least in the West, is however the influence of Islam itself, specifically of religious authority stifling independent thought. "Fanatical Mohammedans" [sic] are a longstanding Western trope, and for modern Western secularists they provide a suitable warning of the possible effects of Christian fundamentalism. Some items of evidence can be found to support these arguments in a more sophisticated form. Occasionalism, a position which holds that all natural events ("occasions") are direct actions of God, gained a substantial following in classical Islamic thought (Fakhry, 1938, p. 1). Such a view undermines the natural sciences, at least insofar as these seek to identify natural laws.

A more general cause of intellectual stifling and decline can be found in the general view among later Sunni Muslims that the "gates of ijtihad," or independent inquiry, were "closed" in the third Islamic century. As a formal proposition the closing of the gates of ijtihad was only fully set forth in around the eighth Islamic century (Hodgson, 1974, v. 2, p. 406). The concept had however begun to appear much earlier. The retrospective dating of the closure to the later classical period thus seems like an acknowledgment by Muslims themselves that their great creative age ended at that time.

The remainder of this discussion will consider the closing of the gates of ijtihad; why it happened and to what degree it may justifiably be regarded as marking general intellectual decline. The discussion first examines the general outlook of Isla...

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The Gates of Ijtihad THE GATES OF IJTIHAD Intellectual Freedom a. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 04:27, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1700465.html