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Islamic jurisprudence, Fiqh (in Arabic and Persian: فقه) is made up of the rulings of Islamic jurists to direct the lives of the Muslim faithful. There were four dominant Sunni schools or maddhab of fiqh. However, they have been challenged in recent times by liberal movements within Islam.
The four schools of Sunni Islam are each named after a classical jurist. The Sunni schools (and where they are commonly found) are the Shafi'i (Indonesia and Malaysia), Hanafi (Turkey, the Balkans, Central Asia, Indian subcontinent, Egypt, China), Maliki (North Africa and West Africa), and Hanbali (Arabia).
These four schools share most of their rulings, but differ on the particular hadiths they accept as authentically given by Muhammad and the weight they give to analogy or reason (qiyas) in deciding difficulties.
The Jaferi school (Iran, Iraq, and parts of Afghanistan) is more associated with Shia Islam. The fatwas, or time and space bound rulings of early jurists, are taken rather more seriously in this school, due to the more hierarchical structure of Shia Islam, which is ruled by the imams. But they are also more flexible, in that every jurist has considerable power to alter a decision according to his opinion.
Each school reflects a unique al-urf or culture, that the classical jurists themselves lived in, when rulings were made. Some suggest that the discipline of isnah which developed to validate hadith made it relatively easy to record and validate also the rulings of jurists, making them far easier to imitate (taqlid) than to challenge in new contexts. The effect is, the schools have been more or less frozen for centuries, and reflect a culture that simply no longer exists.
Early shariah had a much more flexible character, and many modern Muslim scholars believe that it should be renewed, and that the classical jurists should lose special status. This would require formulating a new fiqh suitable for the modern world, e.g. as proposed by advocates of the Islamization of knowledge, and would deal with the modern context. This modernization is opposed by most conservative ulema.
See also
The heritage of Islam, particularly its jurisprudence, has four sources - two founded on historical records going back to the time of Muhammad and two on the development of the science of interpretation in the early centuries of Islam. The Qur'an has always been regarded as the primary legal source of Islam but, when it was found necessary to look elsewhere for guidance, the early jurists of Islam turned to the Hadith. Only when both of these failed to provide the authority sought did they resort to Ijtihad (interpretation) until they reached Ijma (consensus). In the very early days of Islam Muslim authorities tended to rely on their own opinions to establish their interpretation of what a prescribed law should be for any given situation not founded on the Qur'an, a practice known as ra'y. The great jurist ash-Shafii, however, preferred to rely solely on traditions from the prophet and thereafter on the method known as Qiyas (analogy) where interpretations were to be derived from comparisons with relative subjects dealt with in the Qur'an or the traditions. Once Shafii's school of law was fully established together with the other great schools founded by Ahmad Ibn Hanbal, Abu Hanifa and Malik, the “door” of Ijtihad was closed and it was considered that Ijma had been reached on all necessary points of law (though the schools differ in many matters to this day but mostly on minor points of interpretation). Accordingly Islamic jurisprudence worldwide has for centuries known no real development and is based fundamentally on the four sources abovementioned. for more please refer the link: (original source) http://answering-islam.org.uk/Gilchrist/Vol1/6a.html
more reference at: http://en.wikipedia.org/Mohammad_Hashim_Kamali HADITH a RE-EVALUATION By Kassim Ahmad http://members.fortunecity.com/overbeat/evalhadith.html --Vishnu-nlu 09:48, 24 December 2004 (UTC)
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