The Arabic word ijma is normally translated as 'consensus,' or agreement. It makes up one of the four 'sources' of Islamic law. Throughout the history of Islamic law consensus on different matters have enabled Muslim populations to produce new legal rulings and judgements and keep them in place even during troubled times.
Historically, ijma has played a crucial role in maintaining unity among Muslim communities around questions of faith.
Nonetheless, the issue of whose opinion counts has not been immune to debate and criticism. Both historically and in more recent times the issue of whether only scholarly opinion counts or whether the opinions of all Muslims are valid has risen again and again. The issue has remained at the forefront of Islamic legal thinking particularly because Islam has in general remained uneasy with the idea of a religious hierarchy. Classical thinkers such as Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328) were at great pains to stress the principle of equality that runs through Islam, and his own position on ijma reflected this.
Ibn Taymiyya believed that only the Companions of the Prophet (pbuh) could have reached a perfect ijma, because only they had been truly faithful to Muhammad’s (pbuh) words and deeds. From that time on though the distance separating the jurists from the Prophet (pbuh) was too great, so any ijma reached would inevitably be fallible. Thus he argued for a continued process of legal reasoning (ijtihad) to decide what was in the interests of human welfare (maslaha), with judgements being made accordingly.[1]
[1] See Albert Hourani Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age: 1798-1939, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, p. 18-23.
