Raf al-Malam an al-Aimma al-Alam
- Author died
- 728 AH
- Editions
- al-Riʾāsah al-ʿĀmmah li-Idārāt al-Buḥūth al-ʿIlmiyyah wa-al-Iftāʾ wa-al-Daʿwah wa-al-Irshād
Raf al-Malam an al-Aimma al-Alam (Lifting the Blame from the Prominent Imams) is a legal and methodological treatise by Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728 AH / 1328 CE) examining the legitimate excuses and scholarly reasons why recognized Muslim jurists diverged in certain legal rulings from explicit prophetic traditions.
Purpose and Themes
The central objective of the work is to defend universally accepted jurists against accusations of deliberately contradicting the prophetic Sunnah, while simultaneously upholding the obligation to adhere to authentic texts. In his introduction, Ibn Taymiyya establishes that Muslims are commanded to show loyalty and reverence to believers, particularly scholars as the inheritors of the prophets, whose guidance serves as navigational stars in legal darkness.
Ibn Taymiyya maintains that all respected imams were in certain agreement on the imperative to follow the Prophet ﷺ and accepted that every person's statement may be accepted or rejected except for his. Consequently, whenever an imam issued a ruling contrary to an authentic hadith, it was solely due to a valid interpretive excuse rather than bias or intentional disregard.
Structure and Reasons for Disagreement
Ibn Taymiyya subsumes all justifications for leaving a particular hadith under three broad categories:
- The jurist does not believe that the Prophet ﷺ actually uttered the statement (issues concerning transmission and authenticity).
- The jurist does not believe that the statement was intended to apply to that specific legal issue (issues concerning textual indication and semantics).
- The jurist believes that the ruling of the text was abrogated (mansukh).
From these three categories, the treatise outlines ten detailed reasons:
- Non-reach of the hadith: The narration simply did not reach the jurist, who instead ruled based on the apparent meaning of a Quranic verse, another hadith, legal analogy (qiyas), or presumption of continuity (istishab). Ibn Taymiyya notes that no single scholar possessed comprehensive knowledge of every single prophetic report.
- Differentiation in evaluating narrators and chains: The scholar deemed the narration weak due to his independent assessment of a transmitter's reliability, doubts about direct audition between narrators, or confusion arising from an author's memory or lost books, whereas another scholar considered the transmission sound.
- Textual opposition and countervailing proofs: The jurist believed the text was countered by a stronger legal indicator, such as an abrogating text, an opposing established rule, or an overriding piece of evidence derived from their methodological principles.
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