Paimana

A friend at the Eid gathering this year, between plates of biryani and the usual catching up, made a claim about public education that I thought was wrong in at least three distinct ways. I did not say so. What I did instead was something I have only recently learned to notice myself doing: I asked him what he thought the strongest version of the opposing position would look like. He paused, which I took as a good sign, and then gave a surprisingly coherent answer. I asked whether his original claim survived that version, or whether it needed to be narrowed. He narrowed it. By the end of the conversation, he held a position substantially different from the one he had started with, and I had not once told him he was wrong. I am not describing a rhetorical trick. I am describing a habit of mind, and I want to be precise about where I acquired it, because the acquisition was not automatic and the source is not obvious.

I have spent the better part of a decade studying comparative jurisprudence across the Islamic legal schools, with particular attention to the Ja’fari tradition and its points of convergence and divergence with the four Sunni madhahib. When I say “studying,” I do not mean surveying. A survey gives you the positions: the Hanafi school permits X under conditions Y, the Ja’fari school does not, the Shafi’i school offers a third configuration. That is useful, in the way that knowing the capitals of countries is useful. What I mean is something closer to inhabiting: spending enough time inside the usul al-fiqh, the jurisprudential methodology, of each school that you begin to feel, before you can fully articulate, why a jurist trained in one tradition finds a particular argument compelling while a jurist trained in another finds the same argument not merely unconvincing but structurally inadmissible. The distinction matters because the first kind of knowledge is about conclusions, and the second is about the architecture of reasoning that makes certain conclusions reachable and others invisible.

What nobody tells you, when you enter this field, is that it will rearrange how you hold your own opinions. Not which opinions you hold, necessarily, but the manner of holding them. This is the thing I want to write about, because I have not encountered it written about elsewhere, and because I think it constitutes a form of education that most people, through no fault of their own, have never been offered.

Consider a concrete case. Surah al-Nisa, verse 4:11, specifies that if a man dies leaving a single daughter, she receives one half of the estate. The verse is not in dispute; every school accepts it. What is in dispute is what happens to the remaining half. In Sunni jurisprudence, the dominant position across all four schools is that the remainder passes through ta’sib, the system of agnatic residuary inheritance, to the nearest male relative on the paternal side. If the deceased has a surviving brother, the brother takes the residual half. The legal basis for this is a combination of Qur’anic inference and hadith, particularly the well-known narration reported by Ibn ‘Abbas in Sahih al-Bukhari: “Give the fara’id, the stipulated shares, to those who are entitled to them, and whatever remains is for the closest male relative.” The four Sunni schools, despite disagreeing on many other questions, are in effective consensus on this principle.

The Ja’fari position is fundamentally different. In the absence of other heirs in the same class, the daughter inherits the entirety of the estate: her stipulated half by fard, and the remaining half by radd, the principle of returning surplus shares proportionally to those already entitled. The Ja’fari school rejects ta’sib altogether in this context, on two grounds that are worth stating precisely. First, it does not accept the Ibn ‘Abbas hadith as authoritative, because the Ja’fari science of rijal, its system for evaluating the reliability of hadith transmitters, applies different criteria than those used by al-Bukhari and Muslim. A hadith’s presence in a Sunni canonical collection does not, within Ja’fari methodology, settle the question of its authenticity. Second, and more fundamentally, the Ja’fari reading of the Qur’anic inheritance verses treats them as a self-contained and complete system of distribution. Where the Sunni schools read the Qur’anic shares as a partial framework that requires supplementation through ta’sib to handle undistributed remainders, the Ja’fari school reads the same verses as a closed structure in which radd is the internal mechanism for resolving surplus. The same text, the same verse, and two coherent but irreconcilable systems built on top of it, each with its own internal logic and its own account of why the other has misread the evidence.

The point I want to make is not about which position is correct, though I have my own view. The point is about what happens to your mind when you sit with both positions long enough to understand them from the inside. To genuinely reconstruct the Sunni reasoning, to see how the Ibn ‘Abbas hadith, if accepted as authentic, integrates naturally with a particular reading of the Qur’anic shares and produces a system that is coherent and internally elegant in its own right, and then to reconstruct the Ja’fari reasoning, to see how a stricter Qur’anic textualism combined with a different hadith methodology produces an equally coherent and arguably more internally consistent system, is an experience that reorganizes something fundamental about how you process disagreement. You stop reaching first for the flaw in the other side’s conclusion, because you have learned that the conclusion is usually the least interesting part of the disagreement. The interesting part is always further back: in the premises, in the methodology, in the criteria for what counts as evidence and how evidence is weighed.

The Islamic legal tradition is built on a fact that most outsiders find counterintuitive and most insiders take for granted: that disagreement among qualified scholars is not a defect of the system but a feature of it. The word for this is ikhtilaf, and while it is often translated as “difference of opinion,” that translation flattens something important. Ikhtilaf is not mere disagreement. It is disagreement that has been recognized, categorized, and in many cases preserved as legitimate precisely because the tradition understands that certain questions, approached in good faith by competent minds working from shared sources, will yield different answers. The preservation is deliberate. One does not resolve ikhtilaf by discovering that one side was simply wrong; one lives with it, works within it, and develops the intellectual reflexes necessary to navigate a world where two incompatible positions can both be, in the technical sense, juridically valid.

What makes this more than an abstract commitment to pluralism is that the tradition has developed a sophisticated apparatus for distinguishing between types of disagreement, and these distinctions turn out to be extraordinarily useful outside of law. There is ikhtilaf rooted in variant readings of the same textual evidence, where two jurists accept the same hadith but derive different legal implications from its wording. The question of whether the Qur’anic command to wash one’s arms in ablution (wudu’) means washing from the fingertips to the elbows or from the elbows to the fingertips, a question that turns on the directional ambiguity of the preposition ila in verse 5:6, is an example: the Ja’fari position is that one washes downward from the elbows, while the majority Sunni position is the reverse. The disagreement is real, it has practical consequences in the daily life of every observant Muslim, and it arises from a genuine linguistic ambiguity in the text that neither side can resolve by appeal to the text alone.

Then there is ikhtilaf rooted in the authentication of sources themselves. The Ja’fari tradition and the Sunni schools draw on overlapping but distinct bodies of hadith literature. The Ja’fari canonical collections, al-Kafi of al-Kulayni, Man La Yahduruhu al-Faqih of al-Saduq, and the Tahdhib and Istibsar of al-Tusi, include transmissions through the Imams of the Ahl al-Bayt that do not appear in the Sunni Sihah Sitta. Conversely, the Ja’fari science of rijal does not automatically accept the reliability assessments of al-Bukhari or Muslim. When a legal disagreement traces back to this level, what you are really confronting is a divergence in epistemology: not “what does the evidence say?” but “what counts as evidence in the first place, and who has the authority to certify it?” To sit with this kind of disagreement seriously, to genuinely absorb the fact that two traditions can share a commitment to the authority of the Prophet and still disagree about which of his words have been reliably transmitted, is to learn something about the foundations of knowledge that no epistemology seminar I have attended has taught as vividly.

And then there is ikhtilaf rooted in methodology, in the usul themselves, and this is where the deepest education lives. Take the concept of istihsan, juristic preference: the principle that a jurist may depart from the conclusion that strict analogical reasoning would produce if that conclusion leads to hardship or absurdity, substituting a ruling that better serves the underlying objectives of the law. The Hanafi school, following Abu Hanifa, embraces istihsan as a legitimate and necessary tool of legal reasoning. Al-Shafi’i famously rejected it, arguing in his Risala that istihsan amounts to legislation by personal preference and that a jurist who employs it has substituted his own judgment for the authority of the sources. The Ja’fari school rejects istihsan as well, but for reasons that differ from al-Shafi’i’s: not primarily because it fears subjective preference, but because the Ja’fari usul already contain an alternative mechanism, the independent authority of ’aql, that addresses the same kinds of problems istihsan was designed to solve, but through a more formally rigorous procedure. Three traditions, three positions on the same methodological question, each rejecting the others for different reasons. To understand all three is to understand that disagreement can be layered: you can agree with someone’s conclusion while rejecting their reasoning, or reject someone’s conclusion while admiring the structure of thought that produced it.

I want to stay with the question of ’aql, because this is where the Ja’fari tradition makes its most distinctive and, I think, its most philosophically radical contribution to legal thought. In classical Twelver Shi’i jurisprudence, as articulated by the Usuli school that has been dominant since the eighteenth-century victory of Wahid Bihbahani over the Akhbari movement, reason is not merely a tool for interpreting revealed texts; it is one of the four formal sources of law, alongside the Qur’an, the Sunna, and ijma’. This is a claim with enormous consequences. It means that if reason demonstrates conclusively that a particular act is unjust, that demonstration carries juridical weight. The underlying principle is husn wa qubh ’aqli, the rational apprehension of moral good and evil: the position, shared with the Mu’tazili theological tradition, that certain acts are inherently good or evil and that human reason can access these moral facts independently of revelation. The Ash’ari theological tradition, which undergirds much of Sunni jurisprudence, takes the opposing view: that moral categories are constituted by divine command rather than discovered by reason, and that an act is good because God commands it, not commanded because it is good. This is not a minor disagreement. It is a fundamental divergence about the relationship between human cognition and moral reality, and its effects cascade through every level of legal reasoning.

The Ja’fari elevation of ’aql means that its legal system contains, at its foundations, a built-in mechanism for rational self-correction. When Akhbari scholars like Mulla Muhammad Amin al-Astarabadi argued in the seventeenth century that hadith alone should be the basis of legal derivation and that ’aql had no independent juridical role, the Usuli response, consolidated by Bihbahani and elaborated by generations of scholars in Najaf and Qom, was that restricting the sources of law to transmitted texts amounted to an abdication of the rational faculty that God himself had granted human beings. The Usuli-Akhbari debate is, in miniature, the same debate that plays out between the Ja’fari and Sunni positions on a larger scale: how much authority should unaided human reason carry in determining the content of divine law? To study this debate carefully, to understand why the Akhbaris feared the overreach of rationalist jurisprudence and why the Usulis feared the stagnation of a purely text-bound one, is to encounter a disagreement that is not resolvable by finding a mistake in one side’s reasoning. Both sides are responding to genuine risks. The question is which risk you fear more, and reasonable people can fear differently.

Now: does the Ja’fari elevation of ’aql make its methodology superior? A rationalist might instinctively say yes. But to answer that way is to miss the point, and missing the point is precisely the error that comparative jurisprudence trains you to avoid. The Sunni resistance to granting ’aql independent legislative authority is not an intellectual failure; it is a principled position about the limits of human reasoning in the domain of divine command. It reflects the Ash’ari concern, which is not unreasonable, that human beings will mistake their contingent preferences for the deliverances of pure reason, and that constraining ’aql to an interpretive rather than a generative function is a safeguard against precisely this kind of error. You can disagree with this. I often do. But if you disagree with it without understanding its internal logic, without grasping the genuine epistemological worry that motivates it, then your disagreement is not really with the position but with a caricature of it.

One more case, because I want to show how this works at the level of daily practice, not only at the level of high theory. The Ja’fari school requires every legally competent Muslim to perform taqlid of a living mujtahid, a scholar who has attained the rank of independent legal reasoning and who is alive at the time of the follower’s practice. When one’s marja’ al-taqlid dies, the question of whether one may continue following his rulings or must transfer allegiance to a living scholar is itself a matter of jurisprudential debate within the tradition, but the underlying principle that legal authority is vested in living scholarly judgment is broadly shared. The Sunni schools, by contrast, have largely operated on the assumption that the legal authority of the founding Imams, Abu Hanifa, Malik, al-Shafi’i, Ahmad ibn Hanbal, persists through their established jurisprudential frameworks, and that a qualified scholar today works within and elaborates upon those frameworks rather than exercising independent ijtihad of the same scope. The practical consequence is that the Ja’fari system has a mechanism for continuous legal development that is built into its institutional structure: every generation must produce new mujtahids, and those mujtahids have the authority, at least in principle, to issue rulings that depart from the conclusions of their predecessors if the evidence warrants it. The Sunni system, while it does not prohibit ijtihad in theory, has historically channeled legal development through commentary, elaboration, and the careful extension of existing principles rather than through the kind of root-level reassessment that the Ja’fari model permits.

I describe this not to argue for one system over another but to illustrate the texture of the disagreement. These are two serious answers to a serious question: how should a legal tradition maintain continuity with its sources while adapting to new circumstances? The Ja’fari answer prioritizes the living authority of each generation’s most qualified minds. The Sunni answer prioritizes the accumulated wisdom of a centuries-long tradition of scholarship. Both answers involve trade-offs, and the trade-offs are real. Continuous ijtihad risks instability and the fragmentation of legal authority. Cumulative elaboration risks ossification and the gradual loss of contact with the tradition’s original sources. Neither risk is imaginary, and the fact that each system has developed internal mechanisms for mitigating its own risks, the Ja’fari tradition through the institutional authority of the marja’iyyah, the Sunni tradition through periodic movements of tajdid and reform, suggests that both are aware of their own vulnerabilities. To study both systems with the seriousness they deserve is to learn that the most productive disagreements are not between a right answer and a wrong one but between two answers that have each identified a real problem and proposed a defensible, imperfect solution.

I should say something about the Ja’fari tradition specifically as a minority school within this framework, because its structural position has shaped how I think about the relationship between conviction and humility. The Ja’fari school has always had to articulate itself in relation to majority positions. This is not the same as being defensive, though it has sometimes involved that. At its best, it has produced scholarship of extraordinary precision: work that anticipates objections from other schools and addresses them not with polemic but with meticulous counter-reasoning. There is a quality to the best Ja’fari legal writing, from Shaykh al-Tusi’s al-Khilaf, which systematically sets the Ja’fari position alongside those of the Sunni schools on hundreds of discrete legal questions, to ‘Allamah al-Hilli’s Mukhtalaf al-Shi’a, which does the same thing within the Ja’fari tradition itself, cataloguing internal disagreements among Shi’i jurists with the same rigor other scholars reserved for cross-school comparison, that I can only describe as a kind of double consciousness: an awareness of its own reasoning and a simultaneous awareness of how that reasoning appears to those who do not share its premises.

Al-Tusi’s al-Khilaf is, in a sense, a monument to ikhtilaf itself: a work whose structure presupposes that locating the precise points of divergence, and the reasons for each, is a higher intellectual achievement than simply defending one’s own position. This is not how most people, in most traditions, approach disagreement. The instinct is to argue for your side. The discipline is to map the terrain.

I want to be careful here, because everything I have described can sound like relativism, and it is not. I am not saying that all positions are equally valid, or that the exercise of comparative study leads to a bland tolerance where nothing is worth arguing for. In my experience, it leads to the opposite. The more thoroughly you understand why someone holds a position you reject, the more precisely you can identify where your rejection actually lives. Before I studied comparative jurisprudence seriously, my disagreements were often vague; I knew I thought someone was wrong, but I could not always tell you exactly where their reasoning departed from mine, or whether the departure was a matter of differing premises, differing methodologies, or differing judgments about how to weigh competing considerations. Afterward, disagreement became something I could locate with specificity, and this specificity, paradoxically, made me less certain about many things I had previously felt sure of. Not because I had been persuaded to change my mind, but because I could now see, with a clarity I had previously lacked, that my certainty had been resting on unexamined assumptions about which reasonable people could reasonably differ.

This is the thing I find hardest to explain to people who have not had this experience. It sounds like I am saying that studying Islamic law made me less sure of things. What I am saying is closer to the reverse: it taught me to be sure of things more carefully. There is a difference between the confidence of someone who has never seriously entertained the alternative and the confidence of someone who has reconstructed the alternative from the inside and can specify precisely where and why they depart from it. The first kind of confidence is brittle. It survives only as long as it is not tested, and when it encounters a genuinely compelling counterargument, it tends to either collapse entirely or harden into defensiveness. The second kind of confidence is supple. It can absorb challenge because it has already internalized the challenge’s structure.

There is a pedagogical dimension to this that I want to name, because I think it speaks to something missing from how most institutions teach people to think. The Western university, in my experience, trains people to construct arguments. It does this well. What it does not train people to do, at least not systematically, is to inhabit arguments they find unconvincing. The closest analogue might be the philosophical exercise of steelmanning, but steelmanning as it is typically practiced is a debater’s tool: you construct the strongest version of your opponent’s case so that when you defeat it, your victory is more impressive. The jurisprudential exercise I am describing is not that. It does not terminate in defeat. It terminates in understanding, and understanding does not require resolution. You can understand perfectly well why al-Shafi’i considered istihsan a form of unauthorized legislation, and you can grasp the force of his argument that legal reasoning must remain tethered to identifiable textual sources, and you can simultaneously understand why Abu Hanifa considered such tethering insufficient for a legal system that must respond to human complexity, and you can hold both positions in your mind not as thesis and antithesis awaiting synthesis but as two legitimate responses to a genuine tension in the nature of law itself. This is not a skill that Western education, in my experience, deliberately cultivates.

I think about this almost every day, in contexts that have nothing to do with Islamic law. I think about it when I read political commentary, where the norm is to treat the opposing position as self-evidently absurd. I think about it in faculty meetings, where disagreements are often conducted as though the task is to demonstrate that one’s interlocutor has failed to think the problem through. I think about it in conversations with friends, where I have gradually become the person who asks “what would the strongest version of the other side look like?” not because I am trying to be contrarian but because I have internalized, at a level deeper than conscious decision, the principle that you do not understand a question until you understand why intelligent people answer it differently.

I do not want to overstate the case. I am not claiming that comparative jurisprudence is the only path to this kind of intellectual formation. People arrive at similar dispositions through philosophy, through living in multiple cultures, through the slow accumulation of experiences that teach you that your way of seeing things is a way, not the way. What I am claiming is more specific: that the Islamic legal tradition has developed, over fourteen centuries, a deliberate and internally rigorous apparatus for thinking about disagreement, and that this apparatus, when internalized rather than merely surveyed, produces a particular quality of mind that I have found valuable in every domain of my life. It teaches you to disagree without urgency. It teaches you that the goal of an intellectual encounter is not victory but precision. And it teaches you to distinguish, with a clarity that I think is rare and necessary, between three things that most people collapse into one: believing that a position is wrong, understanding why someone holds it, and respecting the reasoning that produced it. These are three separate intellectual acts. The capacity to perform all three simultaneously, without contradiction, is, I have come to believe, among the most important things a mind can learn to do. That I learned it from a tradition most people have never encountered is, I suppose, its own kind of argument for paying attention to things outside the usual curriculum.

The Eid conversation I began with ended well. My interlocutor arrived at a position more nuanced than the one he started with. I arrived at a clearer understanding of why his original instinct, though I still think it was wrong, was not arbitrary. Neither of us won the argument. I am not sure either of us would have known what winning would have looked like. This, I have come to believe, is what it feels like when disagreement is working the way it should: not as a contest, but as a collaboration conducted between people who happen, for reasons that are themselves worth understanding, to see the problem differently.