Conclusion: The Role of Ijtihad and Taqlid

Bidayat al-Mujtahid closes — implicitly through its method throughout — with one of the most important questions in Islamic intellectual life: what is the proper relationship between independent legal reasoning (ijtihad) and following a recognized school (taqlid)? Ibn Rushd does not address this in a separate conclusion but the entire structure of the work is an argument about it.

The title Bidayat al-Mujtahid — 'The Beginning for the One Who Seeks Ijtihad' — signals Ibn Rushd's belief that the qualified scholar should be capable of evaluating the evidence behind each legal ruling rather than simply memorizing positions. The subtitle wa Nihayat al-Muqtasid — 'The Limit for the One Who Follows Moderately' — acknowledges that most Muslims are not mujtahids and will follow a school. The book serves both: the aspiring mujtahid learns the evidence, and the taqlid-follower learns enough to understand why his school's position is defensible even where others differ.

Ibn Rushd's approach reflects a mature understanding of the relationship between the four madhabs and the sources of Islamic law. The madhabs did not create Islamic law — they are organized traditions of interpreting and applying the Quran and Sunnah, built up by generations of learned scholars working with the same sources but with different methodological tools and different hadith collections available to them. Understanding this makes madhab loyalty a rational choice rather than tribal allegiance, and makes tolerance of other madhabs a scholarly virtue rather than a compromise.

The causes of fiqh disagreement identified throughout the book fall into several recurring categories. First: differences in hadith authenticity. Scholars who had access to a hadith held different positions from those who lacked it. Imam Ahmad's massive hadith collection gave the Hanbali school access to narrations other schools did not emphasize. Second: differences in Arabic linguistic interpretation. Many Quranic verses contain terms that are grammatically or semantically ambiguous, and scholars who parsed them differently reached different legal conclusions. Third: differences in principles of legal analogy (qiyas). Scholars who identified different effective causes (illah) in an established ruling extended it differently to new cases. Fourth: differences in how to handle conflicting narrations. When two authentic hadiths appear to contradict, scholars who held one to abrogate the other, or who preferred the later one, or who harmonized them through different readings, each reached different rulings.

None of these sources of disagreement involves carelessness or bad faith. They are the inevitable products of a rigorous scholarly tradition working with complex sources across diverse communities over many centuries. Ibn Rushd's great contribution in Bidayat al-Mujtahid was to make this process transparent — to show that the diversity of Islamic legal practice is not a weakness of the tradition but evidence of its intellectual vitality and its honest engagement with the challenge of deriving divine guidance for an ever-changing human world.

For the Muslim reader today, the book's enduring lesson is this: respect for the scholars of the past is fully compatible with understanding the evidence they worked with. Knowing why Imam Malik held one position and Imam Al-Shafi'i another does not diminish either — it honors both, and it equips the believer to live their faith with knowledge, conviction, and appropriate humility.