Ibn Taymiyya's Case Against Following a School

The insistence that rulings come from the Quran and authentic Sunna directly, rather than through one of the established madhabs, has a specific medieval source that later Salafi and Wahhabi movements both claim as their own. Ibn Taymiyya, writing in Damascus in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, argued that binding taqlid, uncritical adherence to one school's accumulated rulings, had never been required of Muslims and had hardened over time into an obstacle between believers and the texts themselves. Jon Hoover's study of Ibn Taymiyya describes his position as narrower than a rejection of the schools outright: he accepted that most believers lack the training to derive rulings independently and would still need to consult scholars, but he denied that a scholar capable of examining the primary texts was permitted to set that examination aside in favor of a school's settled position whenever the two conflicted. Wael Hallaq's own research into whether the gate of independent legal reasoning, ijtihad, had ever been formally closed found no such formal closure in the classical legal literature, a finding that later reform movements read as vindicating Ibn Taymiyya's argument that returning to the primary texts had never actually required breaking any rule the tradition itself had set.