However the historical debate over the "closing of the gate" is resolved, ijtihad demonstrably continues in practice wherever Islamic law meets a question the classical texts never anticipated, and two fields show the process at full stretch.
Islamic finance exists because classical jurisprudence prohibits riba, usually translated interest, and gharar, excessive uncertainty, both fixtures of conventional banking. Modern scholars sitting on the sharia boards of Islamic banks have derived structures such as murabaha, a cost-plus sale replacing an interest-bearing loan, and sukuk, asset-backed instruments replacing conventional bonds, through analogical reasoning (qiyas) from classical sale and partnership contracts. The industry, now holding trillions of dollars in assets globally, depends entirely on continuing ijtihad, and it draws real criticism from within Islamic scholarship itself, including from the influential jurist Muhammad Taqi Usmani, that some products replicate conventional finance's economic substance while satisfying only its legal form.
Bioethics has produced comparably active rulings on organ transplantation, life support withdrawal, and assisted reproduction, issued by bodies such as the Islamic Fiqh Academy of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, founded in 1981 specifically to produce collective rulings on questions no single classical school had addressed, since questions like brain-death criteria or in-vitro fertilisation did not exist for the medieval jurists to rule on. These bodies typically issue majority and minority positions rather than a single answer, which is itself continuous with the pluralism among the classical schools, extended to entirely new subject matter.