noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun

1. 1
   The process of Muslim jurists or scholars making a legal or scientific judgment by independent reasoning from the Qur'an and the Sunna; discretion. countable, uncountable
2. 2
   the endeavor of a Muslim scholar to derive a rule of divine law from the Koran and Hadith without relying on the views of other scholars; by the end of the 10th century theologians decided that debate on such matters would be closed and Muslim theology and law were frozen wordnet

Etymology

Borrowed from Arabic اِجْتِهَاد (ijtihād, “diligence”).

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.