Following a Living Voice, Not a Closed Book

Twelver Shia law asks something structurally different of an ordinary believer than the Sunni schools do. A Sunni Muslim who is not a jurist typically follows one of the four established madhabs, Hanafi, Maliki, Shafii or Hanbali, whose founding scholars died centuries ago and whose accumulated rulings a believer may follow without needing a living authority to consult. Twelver doctrine, as Moojan Momen's history of the tradition sets out, requires the opposite: since the twelfth Imam is in occultation and not available to rule directly, an ordinary believer, a muqallid, must identify and follow a living marja al taqlid, a source of emulation currently exercising qualified independent reasoning, rather than relying on a jurist's rulings after that jurist has died. Linda Walbridge's edited study of the marjaiyya describes the reasoning behind the requirement plainly: law has to keep responding to genuinely new questions, and only a jurist alive and actively reasoning through the tradition's sources can do that responsibly. A believer who kept following a deceased jurist's already fixed rulings would, on this account, be following a frozen snapshot of the law rather than the law itself as it continues to be worked out.