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Everything discussed in this short piece, the different types of mujtahid, their prerequisites, and Walī Allāh's own conclusion on the matter, can be found in the Muqaddimah of al-ʿIqd al-Jīd fī Aḥkām al-Ijtihād wa'l-Taqlīd, available on Shamela.

One of the more persistent confusions in modern debates about taqlīd is the assumption that ijtihād is a binary: either you're a mujtahid, fully independent of any school, or you're a muqallid, bound to repeat your imam's positions without knowing why. Walī Allāh's typology pushes back on that. It's a hierarchy of rank, not a strict category, and it draws on the classical scheme already established by al-Nawawī, al-Rāfiʿī, and others.

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THE ABSOLUTE MUJTAHID: TWO SUBTYPES, NOT ONE

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At the top sits the mujtahid muṭlaq, the absolute mujtahid. Even this rank splits in two.

The independent mujtahid (mustaqill) is distinguished by three things:

1. He has worked out the legal principles (uṣūl) underlying his own conclusions himself, rather than inheriting them from someone else.

2. He has surveyed the Qurʾān, ḥadīth, and reports (āthār) comprehensively enough to settle already existing questions, weigh conflicting proofs against one another, identify which of several possible readings is strongest, and show the basis from which the ruling is drawn. Nawawī's own estimate is that this second task alone makes up two thirds of al-Shāfiʿī's scholarly achievement, a good reminder of how much work is packed into what sounds, from a distance, like a single job description.

3. He can address genuinely new questions, ones with no prior answer, by deriving their rulings straight from the proofs.

The affiliated mujtahid (muntasib) is the more interesting case, especially if you're thinking about the relationship between authority and independence. He adopts his teacher's uṣūl wholesale and leans heavily on his teacher's prior work when investigating proofs. And yet he still counts as an absolute mujtahid, because he has genuine certainty (yaqīn) about the rulings on the basis of their proofs, and he's capable of deriving new rulings from them, whether he actually does so often or only rarely. Relying on a teacher's uṣūl isn't disqualifying in itself. What disqualifies someone is the absence of independent conviction grounded in evidence.

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BELOW THE ABSOLUTE RANK

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Two further ranks sit beneath the mujtahid muṭlaq. The drop here is a drop in scope, not in seriousness.

The mujtahid within the madhhab (mujtahid fī al-madhhab) follows his imam wherever the imam has an explicit statement. But he knows his imam's uṣūl and the foundations the madhhab is built on, so when a new case comes up with no explicit precedent, he does ijtihād according to the madhhab's own method, working from the imam's statements and following his approach.

The mujtahid of fatwā (mujtahid al-fatwā) is a rank below that. He has deep command of the madhhab's substantive positions and can prefer one transmitted opinion over another, or one companion jurist's view over another's, within the school. He isn't deriving new rulings from the primary sources himself; he's adjudicating among the ones already on the table.

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WALĪ ALLĀH'S OWN CONCLUSION

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Having laid out this taxonomy, Walī Allāh draws a conclusion worth quoting in full:

"It likewise remains an ijtihād whether the person arrived at it with the help of someone who pointed out the various forms the question could take and indicated the sources from which the rulings could be drawn from the detailed proofs, or whether he reached it without that help.

So the view that someone who agrees with his teacher on most questions, but who knows the proof behind each individual ruling, whose heart finds satisfaction in that proof, and who acts with clear insight in what he does, is not a mujtahid, is simply a mistaken view."

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READING THIS AGAINST THE WIDER DEBATE

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What this taxonomy rules out is the idea that "follows a teacher" and "is a mujtahid" are mutually exclusive. The muntasib mujtahid follows his teacher's uṣūl and leans on his teacher's research and still counts as a mujtahid, because what matters is whether his adherence to the school's rulings rests on his own grasp of the proofs, not on unexamined deference. Even the mujtahid fī al-madhhab, working well inside the boundaries of a single school, is still doing real ijtihād whenever precedent runs out. Walī Allāh's closing point, that substantial agreement with one's teacher doesn't disqualify someone from being a mujtahid so long as they know the proof behind each ruling and their heart is satisfied by it, is really just this classical structure restated and defended against anyone who'd want to flatten it.

It's worth situating this text within Walī Allāh's broader project rather than treating it as a straightforward precursor to the later Ahl-i Ḥadīth position, with which it's sometimes casually lumped together. The two differ on several counts.

Walī Allāh isn't trying to dismantle madhhab based taqlīd in favor of direct ittibāʿ to ḥadīth, the way Ibn al-Qayyim does. He's proposing a modulated hierarchy of interpretive competence, close to the post classical typology laid out above. His claim that one can remain a mujtahid while largely agreeing with one's teacher, so long as the proofs are known and assented to with discernment, fits with his broader project of tawfīq, of bringing the schools closer together, rather than with a frontal critique of taqlīd. Al-ʿIqd al-Jīd is precisely the text where he works out this moderate position, looking for a middle path between the outright rejection of taqlīd (a position someone like Ṣiddīq Ḥasan Khān would later champion) and its absolutization by later madhhab partisans. This isn't an anti madhhab text in the Ahl-i Ḥadīth sense. It's trying to preserve the possibility of ijtihād without calling for the schools to be abandoned, which is a fairly different move. The madhhab framework keeps its value throughout, even as Walī Allāh refuses to let it harden into total hermeneutical closure.

Four points of contrast with the later Ahl-i Ḥadīth position follow from this:

Hierarchy versus binarity. Walī Allāh keeps a graded scale of interpretive competence (mujtahid muṭlaq, muntasib, fī al-madhhab, muqayyad, and so on), so ijtihād is a spectrum rather than a single threshold. The Ahl-i Ḥadīth, especially after Ṣiddīq Ḥasan Khān and Nazīr Ḥusayn, tend to collapse this hierarchy: either you follow the proof directly (ittibāʿ) or you're doing blind taqlīd. The intermediate ground Walī Allāh cultivates so carefully, the mujtahid fī al-madhhab who stays within a framework while still reasoning from the proofs, loses its relevance in their scheme.

The status of the madhhab itself. For Walī Allāh, the madhhab framework stays a legitimate, even recommended, hermeneutical structure for the masses (ʿawāmm); he doesn't question the need for taqlīd among those who lack the competence for anything more. The Ahl-i Ḥadīth, by contrast, tend to present madhhab attachment as contingent, even as a historical innovation that postdates the Salaf, and therefore dispensable in principle for any Muslim capable of understanding an authentic ḥadīth, not just for the qualified mujtahid.

The aim of the respective projects. Walī Allāh's move in al-ʿIqd al-Jīd is conciliatory: tawfīq and jamʿ between the schools, absorbing divergent positions into a synthesis, something you also see in Ḥujjat Allāh al-Bāligha. The Ahl-i Ḥadīth move is more dissolutive: the madhhab as a normative category has to give way before the direct authority of authenticated ḥadīth.

The threshold for access to ijtihād. In the passage above, Walī Allāh widens the definition of mujtahid (majority agreement with the teacher, plus knowledge of the proof, plus satisfaction of the heart), but that widening stays internal to a rigorous logic of scholarly competence. In Ahl-i Ḥadīth rhetoric the move often goes further: the capacity for ittibāʿ, following a proof you understand, gets democratized well below the threshold of scholarly ijtihād. That's not quite the same operation, even if both positions claim a wariness toward rigid taqlīd.

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