Page:Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje - Mohammedanism (1916).djvu/109

 102 is needed by the muftî, if he is not to fall into the snares of the world.

Besides qâdhîs who settle legal disputes of a certain kind according to the revealed law, the state requires its own advisers who can explain that law, i. e., official muftîs. Firstly, the government itself may be involved in a litigation; moreover in some government regulations it may be necessary to avoid giving offence to canonists and their strict disciples. In such cases it is better to be armed beforehand with an expert opinion than to be exposed to dangerous criticism which might find an echo in a wide circle. The official muftî must therefore be somewhat pliable, to say the least. Moreover, any private person has the right to put questions to the state muftî; and the qâdhî court is bound to take his answers into account in its decisions. In this way the muftîs have absorbed a part of the duties of the qâdhîs, and so their office is dragged along in the degradation that the unofficial canonists denounce unweariedly in their writings and in their teaching.

The way in which the most important muftî places are filled and above all the position which the head-muftî of the Turkish Empire, the Sheikh-ul-Islâm, holds at any particular period, may well serve as a touchstone of the influence of the canonists on public life. If this is great, then even the most powerful sultan has only the possibility of choice between a few great scholars, put forward or at all events not disapproved