What should the ignorant do in lands where there are no scholars?

The Shaykh : I mentioned one of them earlier... I do not ask that a Bedouin should study fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) directly, or study the fiqh of the Sunnah. This varies from place to place, from country to country, from group to group... Take, for example, a young American who has embraced Islam. Let us assume he has no knowledge regarding these issues that have occupied the Muslim world for centuries, involving ijtihad (independent legal reasoning), taqlid (following a scholar without knowing his evidence), and adherence, and so on. I answered as follows: Take our lands, for example, or Albania, and apply this to all non-Arab lands where there are no scholars who say, "Allah said so" or "The Messenger of Allah said so." The scholars there are those who have studied the Hanafi school. The Hanafi school contains the school of Abu Hanifah, the school of Muhammad ibn al-Hasan, Abu Yusuf, and those who came after them from his followers, whom they call mujtahids (scholars qualified to derive rulings) within the school, and then the followers, and so on. This is the Hanafi school. These people study Hanafi fiqh; they do not want to study the fiqh of Abu Hanifah specifically. They study the fiqh of the Hanafi school as it has been over these long centuries. What should this common person do? He wants to ask this scholar, but he is not a scholar; he is a follower, and a follower of the Hanafi school. This scholar is not truly a scholar in reality. The Albanian Muslim community, for example, cannot fulfill the verse mentioned earlier: . And 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 about Albania and other places, and so on? Therefore, it is said here that dire necessity permits the prohibited, and dire necessity is measured by its extent. Generally, in Albania, for example, or I guarantee that each person rides on his own head and relies on his ignorance, and so on. No one asks these people who are called scholars, but who are in reality not scholars, but rather followers. When Ibn Hazm says, "Either a mujtahid or a follower," well, what does a follower do? He asks the mujtahid. Well, where is the mujtahid? The mujtahid today is very rare in the Arab world. So he asks the one who follows, if he is the one who tries to know the evidence for issues from the differences of scholars, and so on. So I say: This is a continuous ruling that each person must fulfill individually. The scholar must answer, and the non-scholar must ask, and not wait in his ignorance and his 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—for example—in America or in France, or so on, who should he ask? There are no scholars there to whom he can turn to ask and who will give him a book in any of the Islamic schools of jurisprudence, and he proceeds on that. This is better than him riding on his ignorance, if we do not call his previous state disbelief, and issuing fatwas (scholarly legal rulings) on his own in his ignorance. No, by Allah, some evil is less than some. When the Muslim tries to proceed from this principle that you are not a scholar, so ask the scholar, no, by Allah, there is no scholar. Well, but there is someone more knowledgeable than you—no, I am...—perhaps I have answered you.

The questioner : I have answered, my Shaykh. May Allah reward you with good.

The questioner : You have answered me.

The Shaykh : If Allah wills.