taqlid, Arabic Taqlīd, (“covering with authority”), in Islāmic law, the unquestioning acceptance of the legal decisions of another without knowing the basis of those decisions. There is a wide range of opinion about taqlid among different groups or schools of Muslims. Of the four Sunnite legal schools, the Shāfiʿīyah, the Mālikīyah, and the Ḥanafīyah all embrace taqlid, while the Ḥanābilah reject it. Shīʿite Muslims hold to an affirmative but quite different understanding of the institution.
Those Sunnites who affirm taqlid believe that the legal scholars of the early period were uniquely qualified to derive authoritative legal opinions, binding upon the whole Muslim community, from the source materials of Islāmic law, the Qurʾān and the sunna of the Prophet. In the early period, a series of great legal scholars exercised independent interpretation (ijtihād) of the sources, carrying out their efforts through the use of such legal tools as analogical reasoning (qiyās). In the third Islāmic century (9th century ad) and subsequent centuries, with the emergence of legal schools formed around some of the most significant scholars, it came to be widely believed that all important questions of law had been dealt with and that the right of independent interpretation had been withdrawn for future generations. Henceforward, all were to accept the decisions of the early authorities—i.e., to exercise taqlid toward them. This doctrine is usually expressed as “the closing of the gates of ijtihād” (bāb al-ijtihād).
By contrast, Ḥanābilite scholars and others who follow the teachings of the school (e.g., the modern sect of the Wahhābīs) insist on the necessity of returning directly to the sources to make independent judgments of their meaning. In the 19th and 20th centuries, Muslim modernists engaged in bitter polemics against taqlid, which they held encourages stagnation of the law and Muslim backwardness.
In its use among the Shīʿites, taqlid refers to the necessity for a layman to accept and follow the opinions of an expert in Islāmic law (mujtahid). Every individual who does not himself have the qualifications to interpret the sources of the law must choose a member of the religious class (the ʿulamāʾ) whom he accepts as his marjaʾ-i taqlīd (“source of authority”) and whose teachings he observes. When his chosen mujtahid dies, he must select and obey another, because it is forbidden to follow a dead guide. In this sense taqlid is compulsory for Shīʿites.
