What is your opinion regarding Ibn Hazm's statement in his book *Al-Ahkam*?

The questioner : Our Shaykh, the issue of ijtihad and taqlid. Ibn Hazm says in *Al-Ahkam*, our Shaykh: "People are of two types: the mujtahid and the muqallid. The muqallid is sinful, and the mujtahid receives reward." So the question arises: can an ignorant person perform ijtihad? He says: he performs ijtihad if he asks about the ruling of Allah... A Muslim person existing on the face of the earth is sinful if he does not ask about the ruling of Allah and His Messenger? In this formulation, he is a mujtahid. So what do you see, our Shaykh, in this?

The Shaykh : It is as he says, but detail is necessary. Allah is the Greatest, Allah is the Greatest. The intent of Ibn Hazm's words—may Allah have mercy on him—is that a person should not proceed according to his desires and ignorance, because as came in some athar: "Be a scholar, or a student, or a listener, and do not be the fourth, lest you perish." Our Lord—Mighty and Majestic—says, and this is the verse I often dwell upon: . So the verse divided the Muslim community into two sections: a section of scholars and a section of non-scholars. With a guided American Muslim youth, and assuming he has no knowledge regarding these issues that have occupied the Muslim world for centuries—ijtihad, taqlid, following, and so on—I answered as follows: Like our countries, for example, Albania, and by analogy all non-Arab lands where there are no scholars who say "Allah said" or "The Messenger of Allah said." The scholars there are of the Hanafi madhhab that they studied. The Hanafi madhhab contains the madhhab of Abu Hanifah, the madhhab of Muhammad ibn al-Hasan, Abu Yusuf, and then those who came after them from his followers whom they call mujtahids within the madhhab, and then the muqallids, and so on. This is the Hanafi madhhab. These people study Hanafi fiqh; they do not want to study the fiqh of Abu Hanifah; they study the fiqh of the Hanafi madhhab. Over these long centuries, what does this layman do? He wants to ask this scholar, who is not a scholar; he is a muqallid, and a muqallid to the Hanafi madhhab. This scholar is not truly a scholar in reality. The Albanian Muslim community, for example, cannot realize the aforementioned verse: . Where are the people of knowledge? The people of knowledge are the people of the Qur'an and the Sunnah. These are few in the Arab world. So what do you say regarding Albania and other places, and so on? So here it is said: dire necessities permit the prohibited, and dire necessity is measured by its extent. Generally, in Albania, or I guarantee that each person rides his own head and relies on his ignorance, and so on. He does not ask anyone of those who are called scholars, but who are in reality not scholars, but rather muqallids. So when Ibn Hazm says either a mujtahid or a muqallid, well, what does the muqallid do? He asks the mujtahid. Well, where is the mujtahid? The mujtahid today is very rare in the Arab world. So he asks the muttabi', if he is one, who tries to know the evidence of the issues from the disagreement of scholars, and so on. So I say: This is a continuous ruling that each person must realize individually. The scholar must answer, and the non-scholar must ask, and not wait in his ignorance and desires, and so on. Ibn Hazm's problem is that he has excessive heat in some matters, and there is generalization and lack of detail. And he looks at the principle, and this is the principle: the man who embraced Islam.