There is the Quran...

There is the Quran: ask it to speak, but it will never speak to you (because its profound speech is audible only to the Ma`sum and it is he who can make it speak unreservedly), yet I will inform you about it; verily, in it is the knowl­edge of the past and the future up to the Day of Resurrection. In it is the judgment touching whatever passes between you and the explanations of your differences. If you ask me about it, I will inform you.

Difficulty of Utilizing the Sunnah Some, while admitting that it has been a difficult task for Islamic scholars to deduce the ahkam from the Quran - i.e. to make the Quran weak, in Imam 'Ali's words, the task lying basically beyond the Power: of ordinary persons - may argue that the Ahl al-Sunnah did have access to the Prophet's traditions on legal issues and that such traditions were sufficient to meet their needs.

In reply to this conjecture it must be said that unfortunately these traditions were very few in comparison to the number of contingent issues that arose, and therefore they were not sufficient to answer all the questions that arose.

It was exactly for this reason that terrible gaps appeared in the Sunni fiqh of this period, and the inadequacy of the existing sources and foundations led to the invention of instruments for drawing legal conjectures (such as ijtihad bi al-ra'y and other instruments as qiyas, istihsan, masalih mursalah, istislah, madhhab al-sahabi, sadd al-dhara'i ; fath al-dhara’i ; shari`at al-salaf, 'urf, istidlal, etc.) The Need for Ijtihad amongst the Shi’ah As said above, the Shi'ah did not face any constriction in respect of legal source for finding answers to emergent issues after the Prophet's era.

They did not face any vacuum in Islamic law after the prophet's demise because of their belief that `Ali (A) and his descendants had been invested by the Prophet (S) with Imamate, the authority to expound the Prophet's Sunnah and to perpetuate it, which to them was an inexhaustible treasure that had been left by the Prophet (S) for the Ummah.

As a result of this belief the Shi'ah referred to the living Imam for the solution of new problems and obtained the solution in the form of an exposition of a verse of the Quran or through a tradition of the Prophet (S). They never felt any need to turn to ijtihad bi al-ra’y or to resort to conjectural methods.