Bid'ah

In Islam and sharia (Islamic law), bidʿah (Arabic: بدعة [ˈbɪdʕæ], lit. 'innovation') refers to innovation in religious matters. The category is further divided into bid'ah al-ibadat and bi'da al-mu'amalat. The first category refers to innovations in sacred matters, such as worship, and are generally forbidden as it violates the textual source of the Quran and the Sunnah. The second refers to innovations in the mundane realm and is often permissable, as long as it does not violate the Sharia.

Linguistically, as an Arabic word, the term can be defined more broadly, as "innovation, novelty, heretical doctrine, heresy". In classical Arabic literature (Arabic: أدب, romanized: adab) outside of religion, bidʻah has been used as a form of praise for outstanding compositions of prose and poetry. The alternative positive concept for bidah is maslaha.

The genre of bidʻah literature began to develop in (roughly) the 9th century CE (the third century of Islam). Kitab Al-I'tisam by Al-Shatibi is thought to be one of the first books on the subject extant. The literature writing continued in the Islamic world until the 14th century CE (roughly 8th century AH), when it underwent a lull before re-emerging in the 20th century CE (roughly the 14th century AH).

According to Malise Ruthven, after the 10th century CE "new attempts at ijtihad" (creative reasoning in legal decisions) "came to be condemned as bidah", because the doctrine that the "gates of Ijtihad" were closed began to be accepted. Ijtihad began to be replaced with taqlid ("imitation", i.e. following legal precedents). By the time of the Islamic Middle Ages, according to Muhammad F. Sayeed, "allegation of 'bidah' became a formidable weapon against progress". The consensus against ijtihad and in favor of taqlid lasted until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when Ijtihad was resurrected.

In the 15th and 16th centuries C.E., according to Mehram Kamrava, Islam's "conservative default" and opposition to innovation and the institutions they depended on, started to became a serious handicap. Economic instruments — "impersonal contracts, financial exchange mechanisms, corporations and record keeping" — that fostered and protected capital and entrepreneurship and led to the flourishing of rival Europe, were not to be found in Islamic world.

Bernard Lewis writes that accusations of apostasy because of bidʻah were common in early and classical Islam, but practitioners of bidʻah were usually subject not to execution (the traditional punishment for apostasy in Islam), but to something like quarantine or admonition. Only when their innovation "was extreme, persistent, and aggressive" were they "ruthlessly extirpated".

A distinction is sometimes made between the "linguistic" definition of bidʻah in the Arabic language, whose scope includes new concepts, activities, gadgets, etc. that can involve either worldly or religious matters; and the "shariah" definition of Bid'ah, which includes (and forbids) anything introduced to Islam that was not done in the time of Muhammad or the Rashidun.

A number of contemporary Muslim sources (Mufti Muhammad ibn Adam, Darul Iftaa Leicester, UK, Islam Online, Word of Prophet blog) distinguish between religious (the shariah definition above) and non-religious innovation, either declaring non-religious innovation outside of bidʻah, or bidʻah but of a permissible kind.