Trusting the answer without re-solving the problem yourself.
No legal system can afford to have every question re-argued from first principles by every person who encounters it, that produces chaos rather than order. Most traditions solve this by letting settled rulings stand and treating non-experts as entitled to rely on them. In Islamic legal theory this reliance has a specific name: taqlid.
The word derives from the Arabic root q-l-d, to place a collar, capturing the image of one person putting themselves under the guidance of another’s judgment. Structurally, taqlid is the opposite of ijtihad: instead of deriving a ruling directly from the Qur’an, Sunnah, and analogical reasoning, a person or a lesser-qualified jurist accepts the conclusion an established authority or legal school already reached. Historically this was not automatically a term of criticism. As the four major Sunni schools (Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’i, Hanbali) consolidated, taqlid became the ordinary condition of most Muslims and most jurists, a practical necessity given how few people could meet the full qualifications for independent reasoning.
The popular version of this history holds that by roughly the tenth century, Sunni scholarly consensus formally declared the “gates of ijtihad” closed, after which taqlid became mandatory and independent legal reasoning effectively ceased. That closure narrative is real and widely repeated, but it is also a contested historical claim rather than a settled fact. Wael Hallaq’s influential 1984 article “Was the Gate of Ijtihad Closed?” challenges it directly: he finds no medieval document actually declaring such a closure, and catalogs post-classical jurists, including al-Ghazali, Ibn Taymiyya, and al-Suyuti, who explicitly claimed and exercised ijtihad centuries after the supposed shutdown. Hallaq’s argument is that ijtihad continued in more constrained, school-internal forms rather than disappearing outright, and that the “closed gate” is partly a retrospective narrative, associated with earlier orientalist scholars like Joseph Schacht, rather than a literal historical event. The debate matters because it changes what “reviving ijtihad” means: restoring something genuinely lost, or naming a capacity that never fully stopped operating and simply needs reassertion.
Source: Wael B. Hallaq, “Was the Gate of Ijtihad Closed?” International Journal of Middle East Studies 16, no. 1 (1984); Britannica, “Taqlid.”