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

The questioner : Shaykh, regarding the issue of ijtihad and taqlid, Ibn Hazm in *Al-Ahkam*, Shaykh, says: "A person, or people, are of two types: the mujtahid and the muqallid. The muqallid is sinful, and the mujtahid receives reward." A question is raised in response: 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 sins if he asks about the ruling of Allah and His Messenger? With this formulation, is he a mujtahid? So what do you see, Shaykh, in this?

The Shaykh : It is as he says, but detail is necessary. Allah is the Greatest, Allah is the Greatest.
The intended meaning of Ibn Hazm's words (may Allah have mercy on him) is that a person does 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 a verse I often dwell upon: So this verse divides the Muslim community into two sections: a section of scholars and a section of non-scholars.
With a young American Muslim who has guided himself, 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 the lands of the non-Arabs, 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, then those who came after them from his followers whom they call mujtahids within the madhhab, 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, which has been so over these long centuries. What is this common person to do? He wants to ask this scholar, who is not a scholar; he is a muqallid, and a muqallid of the Hanafi madhhab. This scholar is not truly a scholar in reality. The Muslim community in Albania, 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 that dire necessities permit the prohibited, and dire necessity is measured by its extent. Generally, in Albania, for example, or I guarantee that each person rides his own head and approves of his ignorance, and so on. He does not ask any of these people 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 a 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.