The Mufti Retracting His Fatwa and the Conditions of Ijtihad
Machine translationRead the Arabic original
Question:
Honorable Shaykh, may Allah grant you success. The questioner says: If a mujtahid issues a fatwa and then later issues a fatwa contrary to it, is this latter one considered a retraction of the first opinion?
Answer:
First, is this mufti among the people of ijtihad, possessing the conditions of ijtihad, like Imam Ahmad and Imam Malik and the Imams? Or is he a student of knowledge? This one is not a mujtahid; the student of knowledge is not a mujtahid. He is a muqallid. One should know his own standing. Now, he knows his standing: that he has not reached the rank of ijtihad. Yes.
Honorable Shaykh, may Allah grant you success. The questioner says: If a mujtahid issues a fatwa and then later issues a fatwa contrary to it, is this latter one considered a retraction of the first opinion?
Answer:
First, is this mufti among the people of ijtihad, possessing the conditions of ijtihad, like Imam Ahmad and Imam Malik and the Imams? Or is he a student of knowledge? This one is not a mujtahid; the student of knowledge is not a mujtahid. He is a muqallid. One should know his own standing. Now, he knows his standing: that he has not reached the rank of ijtihad. Yes.
Source
المنتقى من أخبار سيد المرسلين 02-02-1437هـ — alfawzan.live (53:57)
The Arabic text is a machine transcription of the audio recording.