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Fiqh

Wikipedia's first sentence called it “made up of the rulings of islamic scholars to direct the lives of the muslim faithful”. Today it says “term for islamic jurisprudence”.
Measured, not asserted. Every count, date and revision on this page was taken from Wikipedia's own history and checked against the live article. The words quoted are theirs.
Machine-checked against the full current article on 2026-08-03.
We saved snapshots of this article over twenty years; you are reading the 2005 one. Red dashes: removed from Wikipedia since. Pale dots: rewritten; the numbered note shows what it says now. 1 tap a number or a side note to jump between them
The opening as it read in 2005

Fiqh (in Arabic and Persian : فقه) is made up of the rulings of Islamic scholars to direct the lives of the Muslim faithful. There are four Sunni schools or maddhab of fiqh. The four schools of Sunni Islam are each named after a classical jurist . The Sunni schools (and where they are commonly found) are the Shafi'i ( Malaysia ), Hanafi ( Indian subcontinent , West Africa , Egypt ), Maliki ( North Africa and West Africa ), and Hanbali ( Arabia ). These four schools share most of their rulings, but differ on the particular hadiths they accept as authentically given by Muhammad and the weight they give to analogy or reason ( qiyas ) in deciding difficulties. The Jaferi school ( Iran and Iraq ) is more associated with Shia Islam . The fatwas , or time and space bound rulings of early jurists, are taken rather more seriously in this school, due to the more hierarchical structure of Shia Islam, which is ruled by the imams . But they are also more flexible, in that the every jurist has considerable power to alter a decision according to his opinion. Each school reflects a unique al-urf or culture, that being the one that the classical jurists themselves lived in, when rulings were made. Some suggest that the discipline of isnah which developed to validate hadith made it relatively easy to record and validate also the rulings of jurists, making them far easier to imitate ( taqlid ) than to challenge in new contexts. The effect is, the schools have been more or less frozen for centuries, and reflect a culture that simply no longer exists. Early shariah had a much more flexible character, and many modern Muslim scholars believe that it should be renewed, and the classical jurists should lose their special status. This would require formulating a new fiqh suitable for the modern world, e.g. as proposed by advocates of the Islamization of knowledge , and would deal with the modern context. This modernization is opposed by most ulema who have a more indepth knowledge of Islam . See also : shariah , qiyas , hadith , al-urf , taqlid , ijtihad1

This is Wikipedia's own text, saved in our repository. Their copy of it is revision 15908879.
Today
Wikipedia's first sentence called it “made up of the rulings of islamic scholars to direct the lives of the muslim faithful”. Today it says “term for islamic jurisprudence”. Read the current article and compare.
2005201020152020Oct '232025
jihad011111
Counts in the opening at each snapshot. Green: the word gained ground. Red: it was cut. Grey: no change.

What Wikipedia says this is

Every article opens by defining its subject. This one was redefined since 2005, and today's defining sentence is their current revision.

Then

made up of the rulings of islamic scholars to direct the lives of the muslim faithful

Now

term for islamic jurisprudence

Struck red text is no longer in the article; dotted amber text was rewritten. Every revision id links to Wikipedia's copy; the text shown is our own saved copy. Data: /data. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA; quoted for the record; not affiliated with Wikipedia.

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