Choosing the Most Learned, and What Following Means

The obligation to follow a living jurist is not satisfied by picking any cleric at will. Classical Twelver doctrine directs a believer toward the marja considered al a'lam, the most learned among the qualified jurists of the age, judged by the consensus of other scholars competent to assess legal reasoning at that level, though in practice believers often follow whichever recognized marja is most accessible to them through language, geography or an existing communal relationship. A marja typically publishes a risala, a practical manual answering the recurring legal questions of daily life, prayer, fasting, family law, financial dealings, which a follower consults directly rather than reasoning through the underlying sources themselves. Linda Walbridge's study of the institution notes that this is taqlid in its literal sense, imitation, but of a specific kind: the follower is not imitating another believer's practice, they are relying on a qualified jurist's ongoing legal reasoning in place of attempting that reasoning themselves, which the tradition holds most believers are neither trained nor obligated to do. The institution gained its modern shape and its wide following only after Usuli jurists, who held that living ijtihad was required, prevailed over the Akhbari current that had resisted the whole framework.