ABSTRACT
The term used to describe legal pluralism in the primary sources of Islamic law is ikhtilāf, which means ‘disagreement’ and usually refers to disagreements among jurists over points of substantive law. In Twelver Shiʿism, juristic disagreements are permitted in the absence of the Imam, when religious authorities may legitimately hold different positions on points of law. In Sunni Islamic law, the majority of jurists came to accept legal disagreements (with a few exceptions, as we shall see below) as an expression and manifestation of legal pluralism, so long as the doctrine in question is not one over which scholars agreed at any given time, constituting ‘consensus’ (ijmāʿ), a source of Sunni Islamic law, albeit not in Twelver Shiʿism, the second largest Islamic sect. Consensus assumes that once a given generation unanimously agrees on a legal doctrine, this consensus forecloses future hermeneutic freedom to re-interpret the sources. Yet despite the dominance of the doctrine of consensus, pluralism was still maintained in some cases through hermeneutic manoeuvres or simply because some, albeit few, jurists did not accept the validity of consensus as a source of law. Consensus was one way to create unity out of legal hermeneutic and historical circumstances so flexible and diffused as to allow for unlimited legal pluralism in theory.
