Well, the origins of every fiqh are the same. There is absolutely no difference. There are accepted principles of the world of Islam, that is, they are scholars, that the fundamentals of Islam are the same without doubt. But how you believe that this belongs to the fundamental or this does not belong to the fundamental? How can you differentiate between fundamentals?
There the criteria differ. Hazrat Imam Abu Hanifa, Imam Shafi, Imam Malik and the rest, they believe that it has to be a direct line of tradition, after the Holy Quran I mean, which should lead to Hazrat Muhammad Mustafa s.a.w. and all the various links between the person who receives the tradition and our Prophet s.a.w., all these links should be solid and the full investigation should be made as to their character and credibility and all that. After everything done, you still and you are left with without any doubt that this particular tradition belongs to our Prophet s.a.w. Then you should rely your judgment on that tradition and infer from that regarding the jurisprudence of Islam.
This is the generally accepted principle of the Sunni world. Yet the standards differ. Of course some imams have taken some very weak traditions, weak in the sense as it’s used zaif and they base their judgment on some zaif ahadith as well. But only because there is a paucity of traditions on that subject and they cannot lay their hands on to a more believable, more powerful tradition. So the choice to them is just either to accept a weak tradition and base their judgment on that or just to give an opinion from themselves. So in these two cases, lesser evil is adopted and instead of giving their own opinion on a subject, they would rather accept a weak tradition as well.
So the principle is not violated. The principle is adhered to as long as they can have access to some powerful, reliable tradition, they will always do that. Otherwise, because there is nothing else in the field, the only available tradition would be accepted. This is the general happening in the world of non-Shia Islam. The Shias have a different way of judging the credibility of a tradition. They say what because our imma are masoomanil khata, they cannot commit error and they are so truthful that it’s impossible for them to relate anything to our Prophet, which he never had said.
So their criterion is this, that whatever an accepted imam has related to our Prophet, whether he discloses the links between them or not, whether that saying is traceable in the rest of the Islamic world or not, regardless of this, whatever the imam says or attributes to our Prophet, that should be accepted in total without question. So their jurisprudence is based or is supposed to be based again on the same principles. But as far as the actual material is concerned, that differs widely because there is always a possibility that an imam was told of something by some weak person who was not reliable. And because the thing itself was not objectionable, he might have accepted it. But this is how we see.
But the Shias won’t accept this position. They say the imma are masoom, they could not have related anything unless they were quite certain that Hazrat Muhammad Mustafa s.a.w. had really said it. So this is the major difference, otherwise the principles remain the same.
