In the last post, we covered Shaykh Hobbollah's view on the scope of Shari'a. This has major ramifications, when considered alongside some of his other views.
In this post, we are going to start to cover the main differences between Shaykh Hobbollah’s approach to fiqh, and the majority of (Shi’a) scholars?
Whilst there are many differences, the three he highlighted as the most important in his lecture at Mahfil Ali (which he asked not to be recorded) were the below [in my view, the most impactful is the second one]:
- He does not believe there is a requirement to
adhere to any form of consensus (ijma’) or the majority opinion of the
scholars (shuhra), because neither of these lead to certainty and
therefore do not have authority. Whilst in most contemporary usul al-fiqh
works, consensus or majority opinion of scholars does not have any authority (hujjiyya)
unless it uncovers an Islamic rule (kashifiyya) [noting this is also dhanni],
in reality, the final ruling in the fiqh works (risala ‘amaliyya) of most
contemporary scholars often does adhere to the views of the majority, by use of
obligatory precaution (ahwat wujubi). This is not the position he takes.
- He does not believe that you can rely upon
narrations by themselves, unless there are enough of them to give you certainty
(or unless there are sufficient other contextual indicators [qara`in]
that together will help reach certainty).
Another way of putting this, is that he adheres to the position that khabar al-wahid al-dhanni does not have authority. This viewpoint had been held by major scholars of the past, but is not held by any (?) other senior contemporary scholar. The traditional scholarship considers that Allah has certainly given us permission to use khabar al-wahid despite it being a probable source of law. Shaykh Hobbollah disagrees with this conclusion. - He does not believe in the principle of tasamuh fi adillat al-sunan which some scholars use. This is a principle which allows the use of weak sources of evidence to derive a law (what I call the “why not, as there’s no harm” principle). This is often used by some scholars to justify rulings when there are only a small number of weak narrations. It is worth noting that this is not a position held by all scholars and many contemporary scholars do not use this principle.
The conclusion from these methodological differences – which in and of themselves in practice have precedent amongst the major scholars of our current time and/or of the past (including point 2) – is that the threshold required to reach an Islamic law is significantly higher than for most scholars.
This means
that there are far fewer Islamic rules that can be derived compared to the
majority.
This may be problematic if you had a view that the Shari’a has to be comprehensive [although you could say that the gap could be filled by principles such as bara’a, or you could use the argument of insidadis, who say that you can derive rulings without certainty (authority of Mutlaq al-dhann)]. However, given Shaykh Hobbollah does not have this view, it is not problematic.
In the next post, we will look at some of the other important ways his approach to fiqh differ from the majority.
Useful
sources:
His short analysis on the authority of ijma’ and shuhra: https://hobbollah.com/araa/%d8%a7%d9%84%d9%85%d9%88%d9%82%d9%81-%d9%85%d9%86-%d8%ad%d8%ac%d9%8a%d9%91%d8%a9-%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%a5%d8%ac%d9%85%d8%a7%d8%b9-%d9%88%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%b4%d9%87%d8%b1%d8%a9-%d8%a7%d9%84%d9%81%d8%aa%d9%88/
His 779-page
book on hadith, Hujjiyat al-Hadith (2016/2017): https://hobbollah.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/HojietAlhadith.pdf
His essay
on the topic of Tasamuh (November 2021): https://hobbollah.com/araa/%d8%b9%d8%af%d9%85-%d8%ab%d8%a8%d9%88%d8%aa-%d9%82%d8%a7%d8%b9%d8%af%d8%a9-%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%aa%d8%b3%d8%a7%d9%85%d8%ad-%d9%81%d9%8a-%d8%a3%d8%af%d9%84%d9%91%d8%a9-%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%b3%d9%86%d9%86/
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