One of the secondary sources of shari’a which constitutes a unanimous agreement among most knowledgeable and highly qualified scholars who undertake ijtihad (independent reasoning by a qualified jurist in order to derive new legal rules on various matters- theological, legal, financial, commercial, etc- that concern the wider Muslim community or nation/ ummah. Some present-day Islamic scholars are of the opinion that ijma’ had been only the specialty of early-Islam scholars, that is, the companions (sahaba) of Prophet Muhammad (pbuh), before Islam did spread outside the Arabian peninsula thereafter. However, other contemporary scholars believe that ijma’ fits all ages and times and must be applied to newly-emerging problems and questions encountered by Muslims in all walks of life.