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Question
I have two questions:
1) Is it permissible for me to lead the prayer in the home with my mother and younger sisters. And how would this be carried out? 2) I have grown up following no particular Madhab, my family are Ahl Hadeeth, but now I would like to learn more about Islam and I do not know where to acquire my knowledge from, should I choose one of the four schools, and if so which one is best for me to study, at my university there are classes for Hanafi, Shaafi'ee and Hanbali Fiqh.
Answer
All perfect praise be to Allaah, The Lord of the Worlds. I testify that there is none worthy of worship except Allaah, and that Muhammad is His slave and Messenger. We ask Allaah to exalt his mention as well as that of his family and all his companions.
As for your first question, please refer to Fatwa: 88746.
As regards the four Fiqh schools, they are all great. Many scholars
through many centuries have successively revised their texts. So whoever wants to seek deeper religious knowledge has to study one of these four outstanding schools: the Hanafi, Maaliki, Shaafi'ee and Hanbali schools. Indeed, whoever studies one of these four schools gets two kinds of excellences:
A. To acquire and strengthen the faculty of deducing.
B. To have deeper knowledge in the field of the branches of Fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence).
The above two qualities could not be achieved otherwise. Experience shows that seeking knowledge without these four schools makes the student of knowledge distracted and confused, and weakens his ability to acquire knowledge. It is not possible to say that one school is better than the other because each school excels more than the other in a given domain. So the student of knowledge should not follow a given school blindly but should take from each school what is founded on evidence. The well-known scholars acted according to the evidence no matter in which school it was found [whether in their preferred school or in another school] like the Imaams Abu Yoosuf, Mohammad Ibn Al-Hasan, Ibn Wahab, Ibn Habeeb, Al-Muzani, An-Nawawi, Shaykh Al-Islam Ibn Taymiyyah, Ibn Katheer, Ath-Thahabi and others.
Shaykh Al-Islam Ibn Taymiyyah
said: 'If a man follows the school of Abu Haneefah, or Maalik, or Ash-Shaafi'ee, or Ahmad and noticed in some issues that the evidence of the other school is much stronger and followed it, he has indeed done well and did not defame his religion at all but rather this is much closer to the truth and more beloved to Allaah and His Prophet 
than someone who follows blindly a particular man other than the Prophet .'
Allaah knows best.
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