Contextualism inFeqh (Islamic Jurisprudence)

The atomistic approach to the understanding of religious texts in ijtihad will lead to a system of Feqh, the rules of which would be unperformabe; it will reduce the criteria of the rules to mere artifice and would not have a clear relation with the purposes of shari’ah; it will selectively refer to texts, and will leave out many religious texts. On the other hand, the contextualist approach to the texts will result in a system of Feqh which has performable rules, centered around criteria, aims at the realization of the purposes of shari’ah, considers all religious doctrines in ijtihad, resolves the current deadlockes in Feqh and is in continuity with the Usuli method as opposed to the Akhbari approach. In this paper, after the explanation of contextualism and its aspects, I will show that contextualism is the natural continuum of Usuli approach.