Whether the Gate to This Office Ever Really Closed

A once-standard narrative held that Sunni Islam formally closed the gate of ijtihad around the tenth century, after which jurists were expected only to follow the accumulated rulings of their school rather than reason independently from the sources, explaining why the living mujtahid of Sunni jurisprudence became a rarer and less consequential figure than the mujtahids of Twelver Shia Islam. Modern scholarship, notably the work of the legal historian Wael Hallaq, has challenged that narrative as an oversimplification, arguing that qualified independent reasoning continued in Sunni legal practice well past the supposed closing date and that no single formal declaration actually closed anything, a genuine and ongoing disagreement among historians of Islamic law about how to characterise the discipline's own development.

Whichever account is right about the historical mechanism, the practical outcome by the modern period is not seriously disputed: mainstream Sunni legal practice today centres on qualified scholars working within an inherited school rather than on individuals claiming the full, unmediated authority to reason from the sources that a Shia mujtahid claims, even as reform-minded Sunni thinkers in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries have repeatedly called for a renewed exercise of ijtihad to address questions the classical schools never faced.