The Fight Over Whether Reason Belonged in Law at All

Twelver jurisprudence did not arrive at its reliance on reason without a fight fought entirely within its own tradition. From roughly the seventeenth century, a movement called the Akhbaris argued that Shia law should be drawn only from the transmitted reports, akhbar, of the Prophet and the twelve Imams, and rejected independent juristic reasoning, ijtihad, and its use of aql as an illegitimate import from Sunni method that had no place in a school built on infallible, directly transmitted guidance. Their opponents, the Usulis, held that the Imams themselves had authorized rational inference within fixed bounds, and that abandoning it would leave believers with no way to resolve cases the transmitted reports never addressed. Moojan Momen's account of the dispute traces its resolution to the work of Muhammad Baqir Bihbahani in the eighteenth century, whose forceful campaign against Akhbari teaching in the Shia shrine cities left Usuli method dominant across Twelver Islam by the following century. The institution of the marja al taqlid, the living jurist ordinary believers are required to follow, is itself a product of that Usuli victory: it presumes a jurist qualified to exercise reasoned ijtihad, which is exactly the authority Akhbari teaching had denied anyone but the Imams themselves.