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History of Shia Jurisprudence and Jurisprudents 1 - Al-Shia The Scientific and Cultural Website of Shia belief History of Shia Jurisprudence and Jurisprudents 1 2023-02-06 660 Views Shia Jurists The study of jurisprudence is one of the most extensive studies in Islam. Its history is older than all the other Islamic studies. It has been studied on a very wide scale throughout the whole of that time. So many jurisprudents have appeared in Islam that their numbers cannot be counted.

Meanwhile, one of the preparations for learning about any field of knowledge is to pay attention to the famous personalities of that field, the views, and ideas of whom were important, and its important books. The jurisprudence in which books have been classified and compiled that are still studied today, has a history of eleven hundred years, meaning that for eleven centuries, without a break, centers for the studying of jurisprudence and related studies have existed.

Masters have trained students and those students in their turn have trained other students, and this has continued down the ages until today. Furthermore, this relationship between master and pupil has never been broken. Other fields, of course, like philosophy, logic, arithmetic, and medicine have been studied for far longer, and books exist. These subjects are older than the books that exist on jurisprudence.

Perhaps in none of these subjects, however, can the guarding of the same kind of ever-present relationship between master and pupil be shown that has existed in jurisprudence. Even if such constant relationships existed in other subjects, still they are particular to the fields of Islamic studies. Only in the Islamic world does the system of teaching and studying have a continuous uninterrupted history going back over a thousand years.

The Shia Jurisprudents We will begin the history of the Shia jurisprudents from the period of Imam Mahdi’s “minor occultation” (260-320 A.H.), and this we will do for two reasons: First , the period previous to the “minor occultation” was the period of the presence of the holy Imams, and in the period of their presence, although there were jurisprudents and mujtahid s who were able to make their own verdicts, who had been encouraged by the Imams to do so, yet due to the presence of the Imams they were nevertheless outshone by the brilliance of the Imams.

That is, the referral of problems to the verdicts of the jurisprudents is because of there being no access to the Imams.