Ibn 'Abidin (; full name: Muḥammad Amīn ibn ʿUmar ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz ibn Aḥmad in ʿAbd ar-Raḥīm ibn Najmuddīn ibn Muḥammad Ṣalāḥuddīn al-Shāmī, died 1836 CE / AH 1252), known in the Indian subcontinent as al-Shami, was an Islamic scholar and Jurist who lived in the city of Damascus in Syria during the Ottoman era. He was the authority of the fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) of the Hanafi madhhab (school of law). He was a state employee with the title of Amin al-fatwa. This meant that he was the mufti that people would go to when they had legal questions in Damascus. He composed over 50 works consisting of a major fatwa (legal statement) collection, many treatises, poems, and several commentaries on the works of others.
His most famous work was the Radd al-Muhtar 'ala al-Durr al-Mukhtar. This is still considered the authoritative text of Hanafi fiqh today.
Childhood
Ibn Abidin was born in Damascus in 1784. His family came from a long line of scholars and was, therefore, well respected. He studied the Qur'an starting at a very young age and received his first general degree of authorization from his first teacher, shaykh Muhammad al-Kuzbari al-Kabir, when he was about 12 years old. He was said to have memorized the Qur'an before he reached maturity. He was a very determined student. After reciting the Qur'an at his father's shop and receiving criticism for it, he sought to perfect his work and studied vigorously under several well-known scholars. After much hard work, he received four degrees of authorization.
Legal views
In Islamic law, a mufti is one who determines what is right and wrong thing to do in a legal situation or conflict. The general rules for the decision making are that one must first base his answer on what the Prophet did and the Qur'an, then on what the head of their particular school of law did, then on their mufti predecessors. There was to be no bias and all of the decisions were to be based on previous methods. However, in reality this was not the case. Ibn Abidin is an excellent example of how the fatwa system worked in reality. Ibn Abidin had a more modernistic view. Being a mufti of the Ottoman era, he was influenced not only by the Islam scholars, but by the Ottoman's, which does not follow the general rules listed above. He also went back and shortened, edited, and added his own opinion to the Damascus mufti before him, Hamid al-Imadi. This went against the respecting of his ancestors' decisions as more sound than his. His more obvious area of flexibility involves his view on urf (local custom).
Urf and Ijtihad
Ibn Abidin's view on urf was that it was important to include it in fatwas. He claimed that many things change with time and that the laws need to be flexible in order to account for the change in urf.
At one point he wrote, "Many of the rules change with the change of time..."
This poses a huge problem with keeping fatwas unbiased. Ibn Abidin's solution to this problem was that Shari'a law was built with the goal of making the life of a believer free from suffering and that if urf was not included in decision making it would result in suffering.
He states that, "jurists should not proceed by strictly and rigidly adhering to the authoritative books and opinions of the madhhab, but should also pay attention to the needs of the people of his time, or else the harm he does will outweigh the benefit."