Machine summary:
"Ijtihād: Takhti’ah or Taswib Mohammad Namazi Introduction Since Islamic shari‘ah (law) is for all people at all times and in all places, it provides for every Muslim all the legal rules regarding whether an act is obligatory, forbidden, disliked, recommended or permissible, which he needs in order to obtain his real salvation.
In this paper I intend to consider briefly the concept, definition, and types of ijtihâd and then examine briefly the criteria and justification of takhti’ah and taswib according to both Shi‘a and Sunni scholars.
For the Shi‘a, who define ijtihâd as the effort to discover the real law from the sources of the Shari‘ah, it is difficult to imagine that every mujtahid is always right.
Accordingly, God has given the right to the scholars of the Ummah, or a group of them, to employ their personal taste and intelligence in cases where there are no religious dicta and select something which resembles other Islamic laws and is closer to the criteria of justice and truth.
In accordance with this view of ijtihâd, Mutahhari says, they accept the theory of taswib, for, according to this view, ijtihâd itself is one of the sources of Divine Law. 22 However, this idea is unacceptable to Shi‘a scholars because they believe that there is a real divine ruling pertaining to every problem and the most a jurist needs to do through ijtihād is to discover it with the help of reliable canonical sources.
Weiss, The Search for God's Law: Islamic jurisprudence in the writing of Sayf al-Dîn al-Âmidî (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1992), p."