Scholarly consensus: Ijma': between use and misuse.

Some conception of consensus is essential for ascertaining the bedrock teachings of the Islamic faith. There is an operative presumption that the normative tradition was defined by such a notion. This presumption, however, is complicated by the fact that historical discussions of the scholarly concept of legal consensus (ijma') can be traced roughly to the 2nd century subsequent to the advent of Islam, more than a century after the death of the Prophet Muhammad. Shiite rejection of the legal concept further vitiates Sunni claims of the authoritativeness and binding yields of unanimous consensus. Sunni jurists and legal theorists themselves from the earliest of times have also casts aspersions on the validity of claims of unanimous consensus while generally acknowledging its theoretical possibility. Despite these considerations, many significant scholarly personalities throughout Islamic history have claimed unanimous consensus on a number of legal and theological matters. When a ruling is the result of unanimous consensus it is deemed to be binding upon the Muslim populous to accept it as the revelation of a divine standard whose import must not and cannot be contravened if one wishes not to risk being anathematized. This particular fear for long has functioned as a tool for maintaining cultural and religious uniformity in Islamic societies. But it has also been utilized at times by scholars and governors as a political tool to silence dissident religious voices. If claims of unanimous consensus are flimsy, what principle determines Islamic normative doctrine and morality? This particular treatise suggests that the early community relied on a far less specialized principle in distinguishing orthodoxy from heterodoxy/orthopraxy from its opposite. It was a broad religio-cultural concept later known as 'al-ma'lum min al-din bi al-darura' ([the non-negotiable] commonly acknowledged matters of the religion known by rational necessity). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]