Every Believer Must Follow a Living Jurist in Matters of Law

Twelver Shia law asks something structurally different of an ordinary believer than the Sunni schools do. A Sunni Muslim who is not a jurist typically follows one of the four established madhabs, Hanafi, Maliki, Shafii or Hanbali, whose founding scholars died centuries ago and whose accumulated rulings a believer may follow without needing a living authority to consult. Twelver doctrine, as Moojan Momen's history of the tradition sets out, requires the opposite: since the twelfth Imam is in occultation and not available to rule directly, an ordinary believer, a muqallid, must identify and follow a living marja al taqlid, a source of emulation currently exercising qualified independent reasoning, rather than relying on a jurist's rulings after that jurist has died. Linda Walbridge's edited study of the marjaiyya describes the reasoning behind the requirement plainly: law has to keep responding to genuinely new questions, and only a jurist alive and actively reasoning through the tradition's sources can do that responsibly. A believer who kept following a deceased jurist's already fixed rulings would, on this account, be following a frozen snapshot of the law rather than the law itself as it continues to be worked out.

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.