The Practice of The Prophetic Companions

(Muhammad Sa'id Buti:) A second aspect is the consensus of scholars that the Companions of the Prophet (Ar. Sahaba, anyone who personally met the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) and died while believing in Islam), were at various levels of knowledge in religion; not all of them were capable of giving formal legal opinion (fatwa), as Ibn Khaldun has noted, nor was the religion taken from all of them.

Rather, there were those of them capable of legal opinion and ijtihad and these were a small minority in relation to the rest, and there were those of them who sought legal opinion and followed others therein, and these were the vast majority of them.

(n: Suyuti, in Tadrib al-rawi, quotes Ibn Hazm's report that most of the Companions legal opinions came from only seven of them: 'Umar, Ali, Ibn Mas'ud, Ibn Umar Ibn Abbas, Zayd ibn Thabit, and Aisha;  and this was from thousands of the Companions (see Tadrib al-rawi fi sharh Taqrib a Nawawi (y109),2,219).)

Nor did the individual Companion giving a legal opinion necessarily mention the evidence for it to the person who had asked about it, Al-Amidi notes in his book al-lhkam: "As for scholarly consensus [ijma dis: b7.2] it is that ordinary people in the times of the Companions and those who immediately followed them, before there were dissenters, used to seek the opinion of mujtahids and would follow them in rules of Sacred Law.”

"The learned among them would unhesitatingly answer their questions without alluding to mention of evidence. No one censured them for doing this; a fact that establishes scholarly consensus on the absolute permissibility of the ordinary person following one capable of ijtihad."

The Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) used to dispatch the most knowledgeable of the Companions to places whose inhabitants knew nothing more of Islam than its five pillars. The latter would follow the person sent to them in everything he gave his judgment upon and had them do, of works, acts of worship, dealing with one another, and all matters of the lawful and unlawful. Sometimes such a person would come across a question, on which he could find no evidence in the Qur’an or Sunnah, and he would use his own personal legal reasoning and furnish them an answer in light of it, and they would follow him therein.

As for the era of those who came after them (Ar. tabi'in, those who had personally learned from one or more of the Companions but not the Prophet himself (Allah bless him and give him peace)), the scope f legal reasoning had expanded, and the Muslims of this time followed the same course as had the Companions of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace), except that the legal efforts were represented by the two main schools of thought, that of juridical opinion (ra'y) and that of hadith (n: the former in iraq, the latter in Medina) because of the methodological factors we previously mentioned when we quoted Ibn Khaldun…

There were sometimes discussions and sharp disputes between leading representatives of the two schools, but the ordinary people and learners not at the main figures' level of understanding were unconcerned with this disagreement, and followed whomever they wanted or whomever was near to them without anyone censuring them for this (see al-Lamadhhabiyya akhtar bid'a tuhaddidu al-shari'a al-Islamiyya (y33), 71-73).