and mandatory. Furthermore, it is not permissible for a mufti (legal scholar) to be a layman who merely practices imitation (taqlid); thus, the judge is even more deserving of this restriction. If it is said: A mufti is permitted to relay what he has heard. We reply: Yes, but in that state, he is not acting as a mufti; he is merely an informant. Therefore, he would need to report from a specific person who is a scholar capable of ijtihad, so that it is his report that is acted upon, not his legal opinion. This differs (16) from the statement (17) of the appraisers (18), because that (appraisal) is something the judge cannot know by himself, unlike a legal judgment.

Once this is established, a condition for ijtihad is the knowledge of six things: the Book (Quran), the Sunnah, consensus (ijma'), disagreement (ikhtilaf), analogy (qiyas), and the Arabic language. As for the Book, he needs to know ten things: the specific (khas) and the general ('amm), the absolute (mutlaq) and the qualified (muqayyad), the definitive (muhkam) and the ambiguous (mutashabih), the summarized (mujmal) and the clarified (mufassar), and the abrogating (nasikh) and the abrogated (mansukh) regarding verses related to legal rulings, which are approximately five hundred. It is not required that he know the rest of the Quran. As for the Sunnah, he needs to know that which relates to legal rulings, rather than all reports, such as those mentioning Paradise, the Fire, or spiritual exhortations (raqa'iq). He needs to know of it what he knows of the Book, plus the knowledge of transmitted reports (mutawatir), isolated reports (ahad), the mursal, the connected (muttasil), the supported (musnad), the disconnected (munqati'), the authentic (sahih), and the weak (da'if). He also needs to know what has been agreed upon and what has been disagreed upon, as well as the knowledge of analogy, its conditions, its types, and how to derive legal rulings from it. He must also know the Arabic language as it relates to what has been mentioned, in order to recognize the derivation of rulings from the various branches of the sciences of the Book and the Sunnah. Ahmad (ibn Hanbal) has explicitly stated the necessity of this for issuing fatwas, and the office of judge is in the same category. If it is said: These are conditions that do not converge [in one person] (21), so how can it be permissible to require them? We reply: It is not a condition that he be encompassing of these sciences to the point of gathering their furthest reaches. Rather, he only needs to know of that which pertains to legal rulings from the Book, the Sunnah, and the Arabic language, and he does not need to encompass all