"The authority of scholars

in classical Islam was supported, displayed, and transmitted through institutions of religious learning - the seminary (madrasa), the "cathedral mosques," the ijaza system, etc. These institutions provided not only a locus from which religious authority could be projected, but also a substantial framework within which the great diversity of Sunni thought could be expressed and organized. To this extent, I suggest that "tradition" was a stabilizing element in premodern Muslim societies to the extent that it was manifest in actual institutions and practices rather than just a body of ideas transmitted over the centuries. This does not mean that premodern Muslim societies were always peaceful and stable. Scholars regularly came into conflict with one another and with political authorities. At the same time, as a group, the scholars exercised a certain authority within designated institutions; thus, their corporate identity superseded any internal dissent, and ensured that there was a place for "scholars" in every Muslim society.

However, when these institutions were disrupted, destroyed, and disconnected, first under colonialism and then when they were placed under the bureaucratic order of separate modern nation-states, Sunnism underwent a radical transformation and experienced a significant blow to its sense of a unified community. This is one of the reasons why scholars from the early modern period until today have tried to find an institutional mechanism to revive a form of consensus that could be relevant to society. The late twelfth-/eighteenth-century Indian reformer Shah Wali Allah Dihlawi, for example, argued that in a town or locality when it was comprised of "the ulema and men of authority." [31] Later, Muhammad Iqbal (d. 1938 CE) suggested that consensus could be instituted by forming a legislative assembly from representatives of the different schools of law. In the mid-twentieth century, the shaykh of al-Azhar, Mahmud Shaltut, pointed out that such a body would be authoritative only if all constituents were granted freedom of opinion and were protected from the arbitrary exercise of political power. Here, the efficacy of consensus is wedded to the process of ijtihad - the continual exertion of the intellect to search for new information or previously unexamined factors that could contribute to different judgments or perspectives.

-from The Story of the Qur'an: Its History and Place in Muslim Life by Dr. Ingrid Mattson, pg. 208