The Emergence of Akhbariyya

The Akhbariyya emerged in the 17 century AD to refute Imami legal theory (Ejtehad) that was developed by Allamah Hilli (d.1325 AD). According to the footnote in the book, Ejtehad is defined in the following manner

Al-Muhaqqiq al-Hilli defines ijtihad as "the exertion of effort to extract (istikhraj ) the legal ruling” from the texts (Muhaqqiq, Ma'arij, p. 179). Allama defines it as "exhausting effort in speculating on those legal questions which permit opinion such that no more ˜effort· can be made” (Allamah, Mabadi, 240).

The first to claim to be an Akhbari was the Iranian scholar, Muhammad Amin al-Astarabadi, who studied in Iraq and Iran, and who thought in Mecca and Medina. In his book al-Fawa'id al-Madaniyya, he criticized the contemporary jurists (these Jurists could be Usulis, but it was not mentioned in the book). Al-Astrabadi proposed an alternate approach for deriving Islamic knowledge/laws.

Gleave stated that the Shia concept of Ejtehad (in the beginning) was heavily influenced by the Sunni legal theory. He also observed that the Sunni legal theory was mostly concerned with identifying and answering the following questions

1. What were the uncertain elements of God's law?
2. What were the ambiguous textual evidences for the Islamic laws?
3. How would a trained jurists exert and exhaust himself (Ejtehad) in discovering a legal ruling that is not very plain/obvious from the texts?
4. Which interpretive techniques were legitimate, the schemes of classification of these techniques, the variable assessments of a text’s authenticity and the disputes among themselves? [1]

Astarabadi, and the Akhbaris who followed him, argued for a return to the earlier Shii attitude of a rejection of ijtihad on the grounds that legal certainty was available. The claim of the early Shii jurists was, then, an element in Astarabadi's attempt to establish the precedence of the rejection of ijtihad over the "innovation” of more recent Shii jurists.[1]

Reference
[1] Scripturalist Islam: The History and Doctrines of the Akhbārī Shiʿī School By Robert Gleave