Usage
The hadith of Muhammad which states that "My ummah will never agree upon an error" is often cited as support for the validity of ijmā'. Sunni Muslims regard ijmā' as the third fundamental source of Sharia law, after the divine revelation of the Qur'an, the prophetic practice or Sunnah. While there is much differing over who is considered a part of this consensus, the majority view is split between two possibilities: that religiously binding consensus is the consensus of the entire Muslim community, or that religiously binding consensus is just the consensus of the religiously learned. The names of two kinds of consensus are:
- ijma al-ummah - a whole community consensus.
- ijma al-aimmah - a consensus by religious authorities.
Malik ibn Anas held the view that the religiously binding consensus was only the consensus of Muhammad's companions and the direct successors of those companions in the city of Jen Medina.
According to Iraqi academic Majid Khadduri, Al-Shafi'i held the view that religiously binding consensus had to include all of the Muslim community in every part of the world, both the religiously learned and the layman; thus, if even one individual out of millions held a differing view, then consensus had not been reached. In an attempt to define consensus in a form which was more likely to ever occur, Al-Ghazali expanding on al-Shafi'i's definition to define consensus as including all of the Muslim community in regard to religious principles and restricting the meaning to only the religiously learned in regard to finer details.
Abu Hanifa, Ahmad bin Hanbal and Dawud al-Zahiri, on the other hand, considered this consensus to only include the companions of the prophet Muhammad, excluding all generations which followed them, in Medina and elsewhere.
Views within Sunni Islam branched off even further in later generations, with Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari and Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi defining even a simple majority view as constituting consensus and Ibn Taymiyyah restricting consensus to the view of the religiously learned only.
Read more about this topic: Ijma
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