Ijtihad is not Permissible in Worship

A religious scholar once visited a well-known Sufi hospice, where he found that people were engaged in loud recitation (zikr bil jehr) and other such rituals. On observing this, the scholar cited a tradition of the Prophet which said that “anyone who invents anything in this religion which is not in it stands rejected.” (Sahih al-Bukhari, No. 2697)

The scholar said that these Sufi rituals were not prevalent at the time of the Prophet and his companions, therefore, they would be regarded as innovations. The Sufi replied that what is forbidden in the Hadith is innovation in religion (ihdath fil-amr). It does not forbid innovation for religion (ihdath lil-amr), and all the practices of tasawwuf are of the nature of innovation for religion.

This explanation of this tradition is unacademic. If we consider its exact wording, it has no basis in the Hadith. That is, something that has been added to the religion the Prophet has bequeathed to his people is expressed as ‘what is not in it.’ In such a case, the problem is not that of a change of preposition; the real problem is whether or not the religion that we received from the Prophet of Islam contained what now presents itself as an addition of later times. It is an established fact that rituals such as repeated loud recitations of Quranic phrases were not practiced in the religion handed down to us by the Prophet.

Religious scholars are agreed on their stand that there can be no guesswork in religious worship. That is, no ijtihad will be engaged in in the matter of worship, in which domain any inference or argument will be held valid only when it is based on the religious texts, the Quran and Hadith. Exercising ijtihad based on anything else is, from the religious point of view, both unscholarly and unacceptable.