Following a Madhhab: Taqlīd, Ijtihād and Mixing Schools

New to the Qur'an? Start with The Qur'an: What It Is, How It Came Down, and How It Was Kept, then read Muhammad ﷺ: A Life. All articles: Deen: Start Here.

Sunni and Shia, a companion piece

Two earlier posts on this site, on the Mawlid and on riba, end with the same piece of advice: follow the qualified scholars of your own school. It is sound advice, and it raises more questions than it settles. Do I have a school? Am I obliged to have one? If my friend's school allows something mine forbids, can I borrow his answer? And what about the brother at the masjid who says he follows no madhhab at all, only the Qur'an and Sunnah?

The House and the Schools looked at how each tradition derives law. This piece is about the person on the receiving end: the ordinary Muslim who is not a jurist and still has to pray, marry, trade and sometimes divorce. It is a research article, not a fatwa. For a decision about your own marriage, money or worship, sit down with a qualified scholar who knows your situation.

Section 1The words in play

Ijtihād is the jurist's full effort to reach a ruling from the sources. Al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111), in al-Mustaṣfā, gives the mujtahid two conditions. First, he must command the sources of the Sharīʿa (Qur'an, Sunnah, consensus and reason) with the tools to use them: Arabic, abrogation, the criticism of hadith. Second, he must be upright (ʿadl), though al-Ghazālī notes this is a condition for others to rely on his fatwa rather than for his ijtihād itself. He also allowed that ijtihād can be partial: competence in one field without all of them.⁵

Taqlīd is accepting a qualified person's ruling without being able to assess the proof yourself. The person who does it is a muqallid. In the vocabulary of fatwa, the one who asks is the mustaftī and the one who answers is the muftī.

Ittibāʿ, "following", is where terminology turns into argument. Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr (d. 463/1071) titled a whole chapter of Jāmiʿ bayān al-ʿilm "On the corruption of taqlīd, its negation, and the difference between taqlīd and ittibāʿ".¹⁰ In that usage, ittibāʿ is following a view because its proof is clear to you; taqlīd is accepting it without proof. Modern Salafi writers, al-Albānī most prominently, revived the pair to separate following a trusted scholar for his evidence from blind or partisan taqlīd. Traditional scholars reply that for a layperson who cannot judge an isnād, the difference is mostly one of attitude.

A madhhab is a school of law with its own method, ranked opinions and chain of teachers: the Ḥanafī, Mālikī, Shāfiʿī and Ḥanbalī among Sunnis, the Jaʿfarī among Twelver Shia.

Section 2The texts cited for asking

Three Qur'anic passages recur in this literature, and they are worth reading in context.

Ibn Kathīr, reporting Ibn ʿAbbās, reads it in context as addressed to the Makkan opponents who objected that a prophet should not be an ordinary man: ask the people of the earlier scriptures, and they will tell you prophets were always men.³³ Jurists nonetheless took the command by the generality of its wording rather than its occasion, and made it the standard proof text for a layperson asking a scholar. That is defensible, but the verse was not revealed as a treatise on legal method.

Classical exegetes split over who "those in authority" are: rulers and commanders, or the people of knowledge and jurisprudence. Ibn Kathīr reports the second from Ibn ʿAbbās, Mujāhid, ʿAṭāʾ, al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī and Abū al-ʿĀliya, and concludes that the verse covers both, rulers and scholars.³² Both camps cite it: the traditionalist reads the first half as a mandate to defer to scholars; the critic of taqlīd points to the second, which sends disputes back to Allah and His Messenger ﷺ, not to an imam.

This is the clearest of the three: a division of labour, where some specialise in fiqh and the rest benefit. It says nothing about schools, which did not yet exist.

Two hadith fill in the picture. Jābir reports that on a journey a man with a head wound had a wet dream and asked his companions whether he could do tayammum. They told him no; he bathed and died. The Prophet ﷺ said, in part, "Could they not have asked when they did not know? The cure for ignorance is asking" (فَإِنَّمَا شِفَاءُ الْعِيِّ السُّؤَالُ). It is in Sunan Abī Dāwūd, no. 336, graded ḥasan by al-Albānī except for one additional phrase about what would have sufficed him.² Note that the blame falls on those who answered without knowledge.

The second is the hadith of ʿAmr ibn al-ʿĀṣ in Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, no. 7352: when a judge strives and gets it right he has two rewards, and when he strives and gets it wrong he has one.³ It is the basis for treating an honest, mistaken ijtihād as rewarded rather than sinful.

Section 3Must you keep to one school?

The technical term is iltizām madhhab muʿayyan, committing to one specified school, and there is no single classical answer.

Those who said yes

A strong current among later jurists held that a layperson should commit to one of the established schools. Al-Nawawī (d. 676/1277) records it as one of two views among the Shāfiʿīs, and Tāj al-Dīn al-Subkī's Jamʿ al-jawāmiʿ, a standard late Shāfiʿī text on legal theory read with al-Maḥallī's commentary (2/441), gives it as the preferred view.⁷ Some later Ḥanafī authorities took a similar line. The reasoning was practical rather than textual: the schools had been written down, tested and ranked, and a person free to roam between them would drift toward whatever suited him.

The Deobandi scholar Muhammad Taqi Usmani makes exactly that argument in the lecture translated as The Legal Status of Following a Madhab. He distinguishes taqlīd muṭlaq, following different qualified scholars on different questions, from taqlīd shakhṣī, following one imam consistently. Both existed among the Companions, he says; later scholars restricted people to the second because declining piety made the first a door to following desire. So adherence is necessary because of circumstances, not in itself, which is a more modest claim than some of his admirers make.¹² The Syrian scholar Muḥammad Saʿīd Ramaḍān al-Būṭī was sharper, calling abandonment of the schools, in the title of his book al-Lā-madhhabiyya, the most dangerous innovation threatening the Sharīʿa.

Those who said no

Al-Nawawī himself, in Rawḍat al-ṭālibīn (11/117 in the common edition), writes that what the evidence requires is that the layperson is not bound to adopt a school, but may ask whomever he wishes, provided he does not go picking out concessions.⁷

Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728/1328) is blunter: no Muslim is obliged to follow one scholar in everything he says.

Read on a few pages, though, and the same Ibn Taymiyya condemns the person who commits to a school and then abandons it in a particular case with no scholarly reason, just because the other answer suits him better (20/220).⁸ He is not licensing shopping; the loyalty belongs to the evidence, reached through any qualified scholar.

The Ḥanbalī manual Sharḥ al-Kawkab al-munīr of Ibn al-Najjār states the combined position in a chapter heading that could stand for this whole article: the layperson is not required to adopt a school, and hunting for concessions is forbidden to him.⁹

Ibn Taymiyya's student Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (d. 751/1350) produced the longest critique. In Iʿlām al-muwaqqiʿīn he stages an extended debate between a muqallid and his opponent, and distinguishes kinds of taqlīd. His target is taqlīd that lets an imam's word override a clear text. He does not demand that every Muslim become a mujtahid. Abdul-Rahman Mustafa's translation (On Taqlīd, Oxford University Press, 2013) is the way in for English readers.¹¹

Section 4"If the hadith is sound, it is my school"

Every one of the four Sunni imams is reported to have told his students not to prefer his word over the Prophet's ﷺ. The best known form, attributed to al-Shāfiʿī and also to Abū Ḥanīfa, is إِذَا صَحَّ الْحَدِيثُ فَهُوَ مَذْهَبِي: "If the hadith is authentic, that is my school." Al-Albānī collected these sayings with their sources at the start of Ṣifat ṣalāt al-Nabī, including Mālik's "I am only a human being; I err and I am right, so examine my opinion" and Aḥmad's instruction to take from where the imams took.¹³

They show that the founders did not think of themselves as sources of law. The question is who may act on them.

Al-Nawawī addressed this directly in the introduction to al-Majmūʿ (1/64), drawing on Ibn al-Ṣalāḥ. He says al-Shāfiʿī did not mean that anyone who sees an authentic hadith may declare it the Shāfiʿī position and act on it. That belongs to someone with the rank of ijtihād within the school, and on condition that he is fairly sure al-Shāfiʿī either never learned of the hadith or did not know it was authentic. That requires surveying al-Shāfiʿī's books and his students', a hard condition that few meet.⁶ Imams often knew a hadith and left it deliberately, judging it abrogated, restricted by another text, or outweighed by other evidence.

For a layperson the saying is a reassurance about the imams' intentions, not a tool.

Section 5Mixing schools and hunting concessions

Two different things get lumped together here. Tatabbuʿ al-rukhaṣ is hunting concessions: on each question, finding whichever scholar was most lenient and taking that. Talfīq is patching: combining the views of different schools inside one act or transaction so that the result is something no single school would accept.

The classical warning

Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr reports in Jāmiʿ bayān al-ʿilm the saying of the early Basran scholar Sulaymān al-Taymī (d. 143/761): لَوْ أَخَذْتَ بِرُخْصَةِ كُلِّ عَالِمٍ اجْتَمَعَ فِيكَ الشَّرُّ كُلُّهُ, "If you took the concession of every scholar, all evil would gather in you." Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr's comment is هَذَا إِجْمَاعٌ لَا أَعْلَمُ فِيهِ خِلَافًا, "This is a consensus; I know of no disagreement about it."¹⁰ Each lenient view was held by someone for a reason; a religion assembled only from the minimums is one no scholar ever taught.

The textbook talfīq example makes it concrete. For Ḥanafīs, skin contact with a woman does not break wuḍūʾ but flowing blood does; for Shāfiʿīs, bleeding does not but skin contact with a non-maḥram woman does. A man who shakes a woman's hand, then has a nosebleed, then prays without renewing wuḍūʾ, has a prayer that is invalid by both schools. He has not followed two imams; he has followed neither.

The Mālikīs drew the line in much the same place. Shihāb al-Dīn al-Qarāfī (d. 684/1285), passing on conditions from the earlier Mālikī al-Zanātī, allowed a person to move from one school to another on three conditions: that he does not combine them in a way that breaks consensus (his example is a marriage with no dower, no guardian and no witnesses); that he has good reason, from what has reached him, to think well of the scholar he follows, rather than following at random; and that he is not hunting the schools' concessions.²¹

What legislators actually did

Governments have practised a softer form of this for a century and a half. The Ottoman Mecelle, issued in sixteen books between 1869 and 1876, codified civil law on a Ḥanafī basis, sometimes choosing a minority opinion from within the school.¹⁵ Family law was left out until the Ottoman Law of Family Rights of 1917, which drew on all four Sunni schools.¹⁵ Egypt's Law No. 25 of 1920 and Decree-Law No. 25 of 1929 brought Mālikī grounds for judicial divorce (non-maintenance, harm, prolonged absence) into a Ḥanafī system. Article 3 of the 1929 law adopted the minority view of Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn al-Qayyim that a triple pronouncement in one sitting counts as a single divorce, against the majority position of the four schools.¹⁶ Scholars of Islamic law call this method takhayyur, selection among schools.¹⁵

The classical tradition did give the ruler, advised by jurists, more room to choose among valid opinions for the public good than it gave a private person choosing for himself.

The International Islamic Fiqh Academy

The most careful modern statement I found is Resolution No. 70 (1/8) of the International Islamic Fiqh Academy (the OIC's fiqh body), adopted at its eighth session in Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei, on 21–27 June 1993 (1–7 Muḥarram 1414).¹⁴ It separates concessions granted by the Sharīʿa itself, like shortening prayer on a journey, from the concessions of the jurists: one school permitting what another forbids. Taking the latter is permissible under conditions:

• the opinion must be a recognised one and not an aberrant view;
• there must be a genuine need to lift hardship, whether general or personal;
• the person must be able to choose, or rely on someone qualified to choose for him;
• it must not lead to forbidden talfīq;
• it must not be used as a route to an unlawful goal;
• and the person should feel at ease with it.

The resolution then defines forbidden talfīq as a follower combining, within one interconnected matter, a way of acting that no single mujtahid would hold valid. It names the cases: where it leads to taking concessions from mere desire or ignores the conditions above; where it overturns a judge's ruling; where it undoes something already done under one school's ruling; where it breaks consensus; or where it produces a combined form that no mujtahid would accept. (My summary of the Academy's Arabic and English pages, linked below.)¹⁴ It is neither a blank cheque nor a ban, and it sits close to what al-Nawawī said seven centuries earlier.

Section 6The Twelver answer: a living marjaʿ

Twelver Shia law, in its dominant Uṣūlī form, has a much more explicit structure. The opening ruling of Ayatollah al-Sistani's Islamic Laws says a person must be a mujtahid, or follow a mujtahid, or act on precaution (iḥtiyāṭ), meaning acting so as to satisfy every opinion. Precaution is exhausting, so Sistani's summary of the rules calls taqlīd the best option for most people.¹⁷

The mujtahid followed, the marjaʿ al-taqlīd, must on Sistani's rulings be male, adult, sane, a Twelver Shia, of legitimate birth, living, and just.¹⁷ Where jurists differ on a question, one must follow the most learned (aʿlam). Several of the rules deal with change:

• It is not permissible to begin following a deceased mujtahid, even if he was more learned than every living one.
• If one's marjaʿ dies and was more learned than all the living, one should continue following him; if a living mujtahid is more learned, one turns to the living.
• If a person later becomes convinced that another mujtahid is more learned, he must switch to him. Moving from one marjaʿ to another (ʿudūl) is therefore governed by the question of learning, not preference.
• Where the marjaʿ has a clear fatwa, his follower may not act on another mujtahid's fatwa in that matter; where the marjaʿ only states an obligatory precaution, the follower may refer that point to the next most learned.¹⁷

So the Shia system answers the "can I pick and choose?" question with a clear no, while leaving a small, rule-bound space for referral. Following a scholar is not a Sunni peculiarity; the Shia tradition formalises it more tightly.

Section 7"Only the Qur'an and Sunnah"

The Salafi position, at its best, holds that the Qur'an and authentic Sunnah alone bind, that no imam's opinion stands against a clear text, and that a Muslim should know the evidence for what he does as far as he is able. Al-Albānī's early writing was sharp against madhhab-partisanship. In later recorded answers, as a critical Al Jazeera essay on his changing views points out, he accepted that ordinary people cannot grasp the proofs and that taqlīd is necessary for someone without knowledge, describing the acceptable form as following a scholar you trust in his knowledge.¹³

That is a reasonable position, and it is also, functionally, very close to what the traditional schools ask of a layperson. Someone who says "I follow the Qur'an and Sunnah directly" but cannot read the Arabic or judge a chain is following somebody's translation, somebody's grading and somebody's reasoning. As The House and the Schools argued, that is not a vice. The honest question is whose reasoning you are following and whether that person is qualified.

The traditional reply, from Usmani, al-Būṭī and many others, is that the schools are exactly those "trusted scholars", refined over a thousand years with every hadith the Salafi reader cites already considered. The Salafi reply is that the schools sometimes preserved errors out of loyalty. Both are sometimes true.

Section 8One question, five answers

Arguments about taqlīd are easier to follow with a real case in front of you. Here are two questions that get answered differently in almost any Australian congregation, with the four Sunni schools and the Jaʿfarī school side by side, and the texts each of them reads. Open a question, and pick a school if you want its line highlighted.

Do you raise your hands when bowing and when rising from the bow?

School	Where the hands are raised
Ḥanafī	Only with the opening takbīr.2223
Mālikī	The school's best-known (mashhūr) position: only with the opening takbīr, and raising elsewhere is disliked. Ibn Wahb and Ashhab, however, reported from Mālik that he raised them at the bow as well.2223
Shāfiʿī	With the opening takbīr, before the bow and on rising from it. Al-Nawawī also preferred raising them on standing up after the first tashahhud.2223
Ḥanbalī	With the opening takbīr, before the bow and on rising from it. A report from Aḥmad adds the rise after the first tashahhud, a view Ibn Taymiyya chose.22
Jaʿfarī	Recommended with the opening takbīr and with the other takbīrs of the prayer, raising the hands up to the ears (Sistani, Islamic Laws, ruling 941).27

The texts. ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿUmar describes the Prophet ﷺ raising his hands to his shoulders when he opened the prayer, when he said the takbīr for the bow and when he rose from it, but not in prostration (Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 735).²⁴ Against that stands ʿAbd Allāh ibn Masʿūd, who asked, "Shall I not pray for you as the Messenger of Allah prayed?", and then raised his hands only once (Sunan Abī Dāwūd 748; Jāmiʿ al-Tirmidhī 257).²⁵²⁶

The gradings of Ibn Masʿūd's report are a small lesson in themselves. Al-Tirmidhī called it ḥasan and noted that many Companions and Successors, Sufyān al-Thawrī and the scholars of Kufa acted on it. Abū Dāwūd said it is not authentic in this wording. Al-Albānī graded it ṣaḥīḥ, and the Darussalam edition of al-Tirmidhī grades it ḍaʿīf.²⁵²⁶ The Ḥanafīs, heirs of the Kufan tradition, act on Ibn Masʿūd; the Shāfiʿīs and Ḥanbalīs act on Ibn ʿUmar; and Mālik's own practice comes down to us both ways. All four Sunni schools count the raising at the opening as sunna,²² so nobody's prayer is lost over this, whichever imam they stand behind. How graders reach verdicts like these is the subject of How a hadith is judged.

Does touching your spouse's skin break wuḍūʾ?

School	Answer
Ḥanafī	No. Touching on its own does not break wuḍūʾ.2829
Mālikī	Only if it comes with desire.29
Shāfiʿī	Yes. Skin-to-skin contact between a man and a woman who are not maḥram to each other breaks it, a spouse included, with or without desire.2829
Ḥanbalī	Only if it comes with desire (the school's main position; another report from Aḥmad says it never does).2829
Jaʿfarī	No. Touching is not among the seven things that break wuḍūʾ (Sistani, Islamic Laws, ruling 322).27

The texts. Almost the whole difference turns on one word. Qur'an 4:43 and 5:6 list, among the things after which a person must purify before prayer, aw lāmastumu l-nisāʾ, literally "or you have touched women".³⁰ Ibn ʿAbbās and ʿAlī read the verb as a courteous word for intercourse; al-Shāfiʿī kept its plain sense of touch.²⁸ The two English translations most people meet on quran.com both follow Ibn ʿAbbās: Saheeh International has "contacted women" with "sexual intercourse" added in brackets, and Mustafa Khattab has "been intimate with your wives". That is worth knowing, because a reader who only has the English will think the question was never open.³⁰

Those who hold that touch alone does not break wuḍūʾ also cite ʿĀʾisha. One night, looking for the Prophet ﷺ in the dark, her hand fell on the soles of his feet while he was in prostration, and he carried on with his supplication (Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim 486); and when he prostrated at night he would push her legs aside, since she slept in front of him (Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 382).³¹ Islamweb's fatwa centre, summarising the schools in 2021, sides with the majority that an accidental touch, such as a hand brushing another while paying a fare, leaves wuḍūʾ intact.²⁹ So if a Shāfiʿī friend goes back to renew his wuḍūʾ after his hand brushes his wife's, he is following his school, and the Ḥanafī who does not is following his.

Section 9In an Australian masjid

Muslim Australia puts several schools in one suburb. Turkish, Bosnian, South Asian and Afghan mosques are usually Ḥanafī; Somali, Malay and Indonesian communities largely Shāfiʿī; Lebanese congregations either. Add North African Mālikīs, Salafi-leaning imams and Twelver Shia centres. The history is in How Islam came to Australia.

Praying behind an imam of another school

This is valid. Ibn Taymiyya states that a man's prayer behind someone of a different school is valid by the agreement of the Companions and those who followed them (Majmūʿ al-fatāwā 23/378, as cited by the Mufti of Malaysia's Federal Territories).⁸ The Shāfiʿī school adds a technical caveat: the follower should not be certain that the imam's prayer is invalid by the follower's own school. In practice that is rarely engaged, because you do not normally know whether the imam in front of you shook someone's hand on the way in. If the Ḥanafī imam does not recite the qunūt at Fajr, the Shāfiʿī behind him has not lost his prayer. Follow the imam.

Marriage and the guardian

Here the schools genuinely differ. The Ḥanafīs hold that a sane adult woman may contract her own marriage; Egypt's Dar al-Ifta, which follows that view, adds that the guardian can object if the match is unsuitable or the dower below the norm.¹⁸ The Mālikī, Shāfiʿī and Ḥanbalī schools require the guardian (walī) to conclude the contract, relying among other texts on the hadith "There is no marriage without a guardian" (Sunan Abī Dāwūd, no. 2085, graded ṣaḥīḥ by al-Albānī).⁴ A couple from different backgrounds should ask before the nikāḥ, not after.

Divorce

The four Sunni schools, by their majority position, count three pronouncements in one sitting as three, making the divorce final. The minority view of Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn al-Qayyim counts it as one, and that is the view Egypt legislated in 1929 and many modern states have since adopted.¹⁶ Twelver jurists require two just male witnesses to be present for a divorce to take effect at all; Sistani's office has also answered a Shia wife that a divorce by her Sunni husband is valid if it accords with his own school.¹⁷ None of this affects Australian civil law, under which only a court grants a divorce; the gap between the two tracks can leave women in "limping marriages".¹⁹

If words of divorce have been spoken in your home, do not settle it from an article. Go to a qualified scholar (the Australian National Imams Council has run an Australian Fatwa Council since 2019)²⁰, tell them exactly what was said, and which school each spouse follows.

Section 10A plain decision guide

My reading of where the sources converge; not a fatwa.

1. If you grew up with a school, you already have one. Learning your worship within it is the least confusing path, and every view above allows it.
2. If you have no school (many converts and second-generation Australians don't), attach yourself to a scholar or institution whose learning and character you can check. Consistency matters more than the label.
3. You may ask a scholar of another school on a particular question where you have a real reason: yours is silent, your circumstances create hardship, or you have become convinced the other view is better grounded. Take the whole answer, not the half that suits you.
4. Do not shop for the easiest answer across every question. This is the one point on which al-Taymī, Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr, al-Nawawī, Ibn Taymiyya, Usmani and the Fiqh Academy agree.
5. Do not combine schools inside one act so that the result is valid for nobody. Wuḍūʾ from one school and prayer conditions from another is the classic trap.
6. If you are Twelver Shia, follow your marjaʿ's published rulings, and switch only on the grounds his own rulings allow.
7. For marriage, divorce, inheritance and finance, speak to a local scholar before acting.
8. Pray behind whoever leads the prayer in your local masjid. The differences between schools are real, but they do not divide a row.

The founding imams said, in their different ways, that they might be wrong. Many who followed them most faithfully knew that and followed anyway. For most of us the alternative was never independent reasoning, only following someone, and the real choice was how carefully.

This is a research article, not a fatwa. Where your own worship, marriage or money is concerned, consult a qualified scholar of your own school, or one you trust, who knows your circumstances.

Section 11Sources

1. Qur'an 16:43, 21:7, 4:59, 9:122, Arabic text and translations compared at quran.com (Saheeh International; Mustafa Khattab, The Clear Quran). English translations above are Khattab's as shown there (4:59 shortened); Saheeh International compared.
2. Sunan Abī Dāwūd 336, sunnah.com/abudawud:336 (ḥasan, al-Albānī, except one phrase).
3. Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 7352, sunnah.com/bukhari:7352.
4. Sunan Abī Dāwūd 2085, sunnah.com/abudawud:2085 (ṣaḥīḥ, al-Albānī).
5. Al-Ghazālī, al-Mustaṣfā min ʿilm al-uṣūl, section on the pillars of ijtihād, islamweb.org library.
6. Al-Nawawī, al-Majmūʿ sharḥ al-Muhadhdhab, introduction, 1/64, as translated at islamqa.org (Shāfiʿī fiqh).
7. Al-Nawawī, Rawḍat al-ṭālibīn 11/117, and al-Maḥallī, Sharḥ Jamʿ al-jawāmiʿ 2/441, as cited by Egypt's Dar al-Ifta, "Ḥukm al-taqlīd wa-ittibāʿ al-madhāhib".
8. Ibn Taymiyya, Majmūʿ al-fatāwā 20/208–209 and 20/220, as quoted at islamqa.info/ar/answers/148057; 23/378 as cited by the Mufti of the Federal Territories, Irsyad al-Fatwa 309.
9. Ibn al-Najjār, Sharḥ al-Kawkab al-munīr, chapter "The layperson is not required to adopt a school, and hunting concessions is forbidden to him", islamweb.net library.
10. Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr, Jāmiʿ bayān al-ʿilm wa-faḍlih, chapter on taqlīd and ittibāʿ, and the report from Sulaymān al-Taymī with Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr's comment, as quoted in Ḥamūd al-Tuwayjirī, Taghlīẓ al-malām, p. 39, shamela.ws.
11. Abdul-Rahman Mustafa, On Taqlīd: Ibn al Qayyim's Critique of Authority in Islamic Law (Oxford University Press, 2013), OUP.
12. Muhammad Taqi Usmani, The Legal Status of Following a Madhab, trans. Mohammed Amin Kholwadia, muftitaqiusmani.com.
13. Al-Albānī, Ṣifat ṣalāt al-Nabī, introduction (sayings of the four imams), English translation, archive.org; on his later statements, "Taraddudāt al-Albānī fī al-madhhabiyya", Al Jazeera blogs, 30 July 2018.
14. International Islamic Fiqh Academy, Resolution No. 70 (1/8) on taking concessions, Brunei, 21–27 June 1993: Arabic, English.
15. "Mecelle" and "Ottoman family law", Wikipedia (for dates of the Mecelle and the 1917 Law of Family Rights); Britannica, "Sharia: Reform of sharia law".
16. University of Nottingham Human Rights Law Centre, "The Reform of Shari'a-derived Divorce Legislation in Egypt" (Laws 25/1920 and 25/1929, Article 3).
17. Ayatollah al-Sistani, Islamic Laws, chapter on taqlīd, sistani.org; Summary of the Rules of Worship, rules of taqlīd, sistani.org; Q&A on divorce, sistani.org.
18. Dar al-Ifta al-Misriyyah, "Can a woman get married without her guardian's approval?"
19. Anisa Buckley, "What are Muslim women's options in religious divorce?", ABC Religion & Ethics, 6 March 2020.
20. Australian National Imams Council, Australian Fatwa Council.
21. Al-Qarāfī's conditions for moving between schools, as quoted in Islamweb Fatwa Centre, "Shurūṭ jawāz al-intiqāl min madhhab ilā madhhab", fatwa 236305, islamweb.net (Arabic).
22. Al-Durar al-Saniyya, al-Mawsūʿa al-fiqhiyya, "Mawāḍiʿ rafʿ al-yadayn" (the places where the hands are raised), with the positions of the four schools and their references, dorar.net/feqhia/907 (Arabic).
23. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Jazīrī, al-Fiqh ʿalā al-madhāhib al-arbaʿa, vol. 1, p. 226, on the sunan of prayer, al-Maktaba al-Shāmila (Arabic).
24. Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 735, sunnah.com/bukhari:735.
25. Sunan Abī Dāwūd 748, with Abū Dāwūd's comment that it is not authentic in this wording, sunnah.com/abudawud:748 (ṣaḥīḥ, al-Albānī).
26. Jāmiʿ al-Tirmidhī 257, with al-Tirmidhī's comment on who acted on it, sunnah.com/tirmidhi:257 (ḥasan per al-Tirmidhī; ḍaʿīf per Darussalam).
27. Al-Sayyid ʿAlī al-Sistani, Islamic Laws, ruling 322 (things that invalidate wuḍūʾ), sistani.org, and ruling 941 (raising the hands with the takbīrs), sistani.org.
28. Al-Durar al-Saniyya, al-Mawsūʿa al-fiqhiyya, "Mass al-marʾa" (touching a woman), with the positions, the reading of Ibn ʿAbbās and the evidence cited, dorar.net/feqhia/435 (Arabic).
29. Islamweb Fatwa Centre, "Madhāhib al-ʿulamāʾ fī al-wuḍūʾ min lams al-marʾa", fatwa 440188, 19 May 2021, islamweb.net (Arabic).
30. Qur'an 4:43 and 5:6, with the Saheeh International and Mustafa Khattab translations, quran.com/4:43; quran.com/5/6.
31. Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim 486, sunnah.com/muslim:486; Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 382, sunnah.com/bukhari:382.
32. Ibn Kathīr, Tafsīr al-Qurʾān al-ʿAẓīm, on 4:59: the report of ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭalḥa from Ibn ʿAbbās that ūlū al-amr are "the people of fiqh and religion", the same from Mujāhid, ʿAṭāʾ, al-Ḥasan and Abū al-ʿĀliya, and his conclusion that it covers "all those in authority, rulers and scholars" (Arabic), King Saud University Qur'an project: quran.ksu.edu.sa.
33. Ibn Kathīr, Tafsīr al-Qurʾān al-ʿAẓīm, on 16:43: from Ibn ʿAbbās, via al-Ḍaḥḥāk and Mujāhid, that ahl al-dhikr are the people of the earlier scriptures, asked whether earlier messengers were men or angels (English abridgement): quran.com.