Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: NOTE TO CHAPTER I. IJ T I H A D . Qcestions connected with Ijtihod are so important in Islam, that I think it well to give in the form of a note a fuller and more technical account of it, than I could do in the Chapter just concluded. This account which I shall now give is that of a learned Musalman, and i.s, therefore, of the highest value. It consists of extracts from an article in the Journal Asiatique, Quatrieme Serie, tome, 15, on " Le March e et lea Progres de la Jurisprudence parmi les Sectes ortho- doxes Musalmanes" by Mirza Kazim Beg, Professor in the University of St. Petersburg. It entirely supports all that has been said of the rigid character of Muhammadan Law, and of the immobility of systems founded thereon. " Orthodox Musalmans admit the following propositions as axioms. 1. God the only legislator has shown the way of felicity to the people whom He has chosen, and in order to enable them to walk in that way He has shown to them the precepts which are found, partly in the eternal Quran, and partly in the sayings of the Prophet transmitted to posterity by the Companions and preserved in the Sunnat. That way is called the " Shari'at." The rules thereof are called Ankara. 2. The Quran and the Sunnat, which since their manifestation are the primitive sources of the orders of the Law, form two branches of study, viz., Ilm-i-Tafsir, or the interpretation of the Quran and Ilm-i-Hadis, or the study of Tradition. 3. All the orders of the Law have regard either to the actions (Din), or to the belief (Iman) of the Mukallifs.1 4. As the Quran and the Sunnat are the principal sources from whence the precepts of the Shari'at have been drawn, so the rules recognized as the principal elements of actual jurisprudence arc the subject of Ilm-i-Fiqh, or the science...