Legal Views
In Islamic law, a mufti is one who determines what is right and wrong thing to do in a legal situation or conflict. The general rules for the decision making are that one must first base his answer on what the prophet did and the Qur'an, then on what the head of their particular school of law did, then on their mufti predecessors. There was to be no bias and all of the decisions were to be based on previous methods. However, in reality this was not the case. Ibn Abidin is an excellent example of how the fatwa system worked in reality. Ibn Abidin had a more modernistic view. Being a mufti of the Ottoman era, he was influenced not only by the Islam scholars, but by the Ottoman's, which does not follow the general rules listed above. He also went back and shortened, edited, and added his own opinion to the Damascus mufti before him, Hamid al-Imadi. This went against the respecting of his ancestors' decisions as more sound than his. His more obvious area of flexibility involves his view on urf (local custom).
Read more about this topic: Ibn Abidin
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