Faqih

A faqih is a jurist, one trained in fiqh, the discipline of deriving and applying the rulings of Islamic law, and the faqih is the ordinary working scholar of the legal tradition.

The discipline of fiqh

Fiqh is the human understanding and elaboration of the sacred law, the systematic work of deriving concrete rulings from the sources, the Quran, the practice of the Prophet, and the accepted methods of reasoning, and the faqih is the specialist in this discipline, trained in a school of law and competent to expound and apply its rulings. The office is scholarly rather than sacerdotal, since Islam has no ordained clergy, and the faqih standing rests on training and recognition by the community of scholars.

Where the faqih stands

The faqih works within an established school of law and its accumulated body of rulings, and most jurists apply and interpret the settled positions of their school rather than deriving law afresh from the sources, which is the more demanding office of the mujtahid. The faqih may serve as a teacher, a mufti giving legal opinions, or a judge, so the discipline underlies several of the practical legal offices. In the Shia world the term takes on particular weight in the modern doctrine of the guardianship of the jurist, which assigns political authority to a qualified faqih. In its general sense, however, the faqih is simply the trained jurist, the scholar who carries the ordinary work of understanding and applying the sacred law within his tradition.

The four schools of Sunni fiqh that still structure the discipline today, Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi'i and Hanbali, each trace to a founding jurist working in the eighth and ninth centuries and spread geographically according to which empires and dynasties patronised which school, so that the Hanafi school became dominant across the former Ottoman lands and Hanafi faqihs the ordinary jurists of that vast region, while the Maliki school became similarly dominant across North and West Africa under different rulers, a distribution that still roughly maps onto where each school predominates today.

The nineteenth century Ottoman Empire took the unusual step of codifying a large part of Hanafi fiqh into the Mecelle, a formal civil code completed in 1876 that reduced centuries of scattered faqih opinion on contracts and civil obligations into fixed, numbered articles a court could simply apply, a model of turning classical fiqh into state statute that a number of Muslim-majority countries later adopted in their own family and civil law codes, changing the faqih's practical role in those countries from an independent interpreter of the sources into, more often, an expert consulted on the interpretation of an already-codified law.