ABSTRACT
Without consensus among scholars or professionals in any area of expertise, very little can be achieved. Each social community also needs a few points about which all agree and no one argues. What complicates theories of consensus in the religious law is that they must develop an answer to the question of whether consensus can be reversed. That is, whether and under what conditions a community of lay followers of a given religion or of scholars of the religious laws may simply change their mind (or practice) about a matter, which they held without any, or at least no significant, disagreement. The reversibility or irreversibility of consensus is both the central question of Islamic theoretical jurisprudence’s treatment of consensus and the key to testing the value of this consensus in a modern environment.
