"Times change, and viable cultures adapt.

It was a matter of consensus among Islamic legal thinkers that the legal judgments of earlier times had to be brought under constant review to insure that they remained in keeping with the times. A standard legal aphorism declared: “Let no one repudiate the change of rulings with the change of times.” By the same token, Islamic legal consensus renounced mechanical application of the law through unthinking reiteration of standard texts. The eminent nineteenth-century Syrian legal scholar Ibn 'Abidin warned that any jurist who held unbendingly to the standard legal decisions of his school without regard to changing times and circumstances would necessarily obliterate fundamental rights and extensive benefits, bringing about harm far exceeding any good he might possibly achieve. Ibn 'Abidin asserted further that such blindness constituted nothing less than oppression and gross injustice.

Al-Qarafi, a renowned thirteenth-century jurist, declared similarly:

Persons handing down legal judgments while adhering blindly to the texts in their books without regard for the cultural realities of their people are in gross error. They act in contradiction to established legal consensus and are guilty of iniquity and disobedience before God, having no excuse despite their ignorance; for they have taken upon themselves the art of issuing legal rulings without being worthy of that practice…. Their blind adherence to what is written down in the legal compendia is misguidance in the religion of Islam and utter ignorance of the ultimate objectives behind the rulings of the earlier scholars and great personages of the past whom they claim to be imitating.

These words resounded well in the ears of Ibn Qayyim, a great jurisconsult and scholar of the following century, who commended al-Qarafi by saying:

This is pure understanding of the law. Whoever issues legal rulings to the people merely on the basis of what is transmitted in the compendia despite differences in their customs, usages, times, places, conditions, and the special circumstances of their situations has gone astray and leads others astray. His crime against the religion is greater than the crime of a physician who gives people medical prescriptions without regard to the differences of their climes, norms, the times they live in, and their physical natures but merely in accord with what he finds written down in some medical book about people with similar anatomies. He is an ignorant physician, but the other is an ignorant jurisconsult but much more detrimental.

[footnote 14: Both quotations are from 'Adil Quta, Al-'Urf, 1:64-65 (Mecca: al-Maktaba al-Makkiyya, 1997).]

-Dr. Umar Faruq Abd-Allah, "Islam and the Cultural Imperative"