“He Applied Ijtihad and Erred...!”

Having said the above, the first person ever to introduce such a concept of “ijtihad” and erring in it in order to justify the crime which others committed is, as you by now know, the first caliph when the second caliph persistently demanded that he punish Khalid ibn al-Walad when the latter killed Malik ibn Nuwayrah, the well known companion of the Prophet (A.S.), when he refused to recognize the legitimacy of the new government, insisting on his loyalty to the rightful caliph (Ali [a]) who was pushed away from his post, then Khalid slept with the murdered man’s wife in the same night following his assassination of her husband... Abu Bakr pronounced his famous statement on that very occasion saying about Khalid that the latter “ta’awwala fa khata’,” or “ijthahada fa akhta’,” that is, he interpreted or followed his own ijtihad and erred.^[1]

Then someone came along to narrate a “tradition” allotting for those who are correct in their ijtihad two rewards and for those who err just one, as narrated by `Amr ibn al-`as, Bu Hurayra and `Omer ibn al-Khattab.<sup>[2]</sup> This “tradition” acted as the elixir which turned dust into gold, even greater than that: It justified the most heinous of crimes and their ugliest, including killing innocent people during the Battle of the Camel, Siffan, and the assassination of Ali ibn Aba Talib (A.S.) and `Ammar ibn Yasir, as we indicated above. Then it justified the cursing of Ali (A.S.) from the top of thousands of pulpits for one thousand months, then the crime of killing al-Husain (A.S.) and the slaughter of his children and the capturing of the ladies who were born and raised in the household of revelation and who were taken from one country to another as a booty..., in addition to other crimes too many to recount here...