Rulings Are Taken From the Texts Directly, Not From a School of Law

The insistence that rulings come from the Quran and authentic Sunna directly, rather than through one of the established madhabs, has a specific medieval source that later Salafi and Wahhabi movements both claim as their own. Ibn Taymiyya, writing in Damascus in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, argued that binding taqlid, uncritical adherence to one school's accumulated rulings, had never been required of Muslims and had hardened over time into an obstacle between believers and the texts themselves. Jon Hoover's study of Ibn Taymiyya describes his position as narrower than a rejection of the schools outright: he accepted that most believers lack the training to derive rulings independently and would still need to consult scholars, but he denied that a scholar capable of examining the primary texts was permitted to set that examination aside in favor of a school's settled position whenever the two conflicted. Wael Hallaq's own research into whether the gate of independent legal reasoning, ijtihad, had ever been formally closed found no such formal closure in the classical legal literature, a finding that later reform movements read as vindicating Ibn Taymiyya's argument that returning to the primary texts had never actually required breaking any rule the tradition itself had set.

Ibn Taymiyya's argument stayed a minority position within Sunni scholarship for four centuries before it became the foundation of a religious and political movement. Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab, an eighteenth century scholar from the Najd region of central Arabia, revived the call to derive rulings from the Quran and Sunna directly and to reject taqlid of the four schools as binding, combining it with an uncompromising demand that Muslims purge practices he considered later accretions, saint veneration and shrine visitation among them. David Commins's history of the Wahhabi mission describes the alliance this produced: in 1744, Ibn Abd al Wahhab, having sought protection in the town of Diriyah, formed a pact with its ruler, Muhammad ibn Saud, dividing authority so that Ibn Saud's family would hold military and political power while Ibn Abd al Wahhab's teaching defined the movement's religious program, a partnership between the same two families that founded the modern Saudi state. Twentieth century Salafism drew on the same anti taqlid argument independently of that specific alliance, spreading as a transnational reform current with no single ruling house behind it, so that the case against following a school of law today reaches readers through two related but organizationally distinct movements rather than one.