The Islamic legal tradition (or shari‘a) continues to develop and expand today through a hermeneutic mode of inquiry called ijtihad. The principles and methods subsumed under the term ijtihad enable classically trained clerics to derive from Islam’s scriptural sources a set of ethical guidelines that help Muslims confront key issues of our times—e.g., sex-reassignment surgery, investment in Bitcoins, gender asymmetries. In recent decades, anthropologists and historians have shown that this practice of knowledge is often driven by the need to answer questions and concerns coming from the laity. Indeed, many Islamic scholars mobilize the tools of ijtihad to solve the doubts or dilemma of ordinary Muslims. This paper seeks to expand our understanding of Islam and other knowledge traditions by conceptualizing ijtihad as a practice aimed not only at answering questions, but also at raising new ones. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Lebanese religious seminaries (2012–2013), I show how aspirant shari‘a scholars learn to raise, debate and formulate questions deemed relevant within the knowledge economies of Islam—i.e., questions that are informed by the Islamic tradition and, if adequately pursued, promise to enrich it. By approaching the shari‘a through the set of questions (rather than the rules or precepts) that animates it, I propose a rethinking of how religious traditions develop and the role that questions as well as other forms of problematization play in this process.