Encyclopedia of Islam

Further reading: Ervand Abrahamian, The Iranian 

Mojahedin (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 

1989); Nikki R. Keddie and Farah Monian, “Militancy 

and Religion in Contemporary Iran.” In Fundamental-

isms and the State: Remaking Polities, Economies, and 

Militance, edited by Martin E. Marty and R. Scott 

Appleby, 511–538 (Chicago: University of Chicago 

Press, 1993); Nicola Pedde, “Role and Evolution of the 

Mojahedin-e Kalgh.” Vaseteh: Journal of the European 

Society for Iranian Studies 1, no. 1 (2005): 113–123.

mujtahid

Among the Shia, the mujtahid is synonymous 

with the 

faqih

: an expert in Islamic jurisprudence. 

However, in the absence of the Imams, the muj-

tahid has the ability to issue legal decisions by 

means of employing 

ijtihad

, or independent juris-

tic reasoning.

Ijtihad has long been a cause of strife in 

Islamic law. Because many legal scholars con-

sidered it to be based on little more than the 

personal opinion of the jurist, ijtihad ceased to 

be a major source of the 

sharia

 in the traditional 

Sunni schools by the 10th century. And yet, even 

within the Shia schools there existed a fervent 

debate over the validity of the mujtahid  to use 

individual reasoning or rational conjecture to 

make legal decisions about those issues in which 

the q

Uran

 and the 

sUnna

 are silent. The a

khbari

s

chool

, for instance, utterly rejected the use of 

ijtihad, and required all jurisprudence to be based 

on the traditions of the Prophet, the Imams, and 

the previous jurists. However, the U

sUli

  s

chool

,

whose position eventually became the dominant 

ideology in s

hiism

, encouraged the use of ijtihad

in the formation of Islamic jurisprudence, thereby 

elevating the position of the mujtahid to “the 

deputy of the Hidden Imam,” or m

ahdi

.

Today, there are so many qualified mujtahids in 

the world that only those who have attained the 

highest level of scholarship and who can boast 

the greatest number of followers, are truly free 

to practice ijtihad and issue authoritative legal 

declarations (fatwa), which the Shia are obliged 

to follow. At the top of this order of mujtahids are 

the 

ayatollah

s, whose authority on legal issues 

is unmatched in the Shia world. Indeed, it was 

precisely this religious and political authority 

that allowed the Ayatollah r

Uhollah

 k

homeini

 to 

impose his leadership upon the social, political, 

and economic forces that led to the i

ranian

 r

evo

-

lUtion

 

oF

 1978–1979. Currently, only a handful 

of authoritative ayatollahs exist, primarily in i

ran

and i

raq

, though their religious and political lead-

ership over the world’s Shiis is still formidable.

Reza Aslan