and their debate over collecting the Qur’an into a single codex until they all concurred on it, and their deliberation (1) on the prescribed penalty for the wine-drinker and for whoever denies its prohibition, until they were guided to the straight path. Such instances are beyond counting; they are more numerous than the stars in the sky.

Later scholars then began to dispute (2) various forms of interpretation and analogy with arguments that could sway some people’s opinions, though close scrutiny often exposed them as bankrupt. Even so, they would accept from an opponent only what yielded benefit, even if it supplied the inquirer with no more than a faint probability. They thus agreed upon a code of dialectic so they might help one another manifest the correctness of word (3) and deed. By means of it they set down rules of inference, protecting them from dispersion and collapse. Their methods, although—when compared with the ways (4) of the earliest generations—did not fully attain the religion’s objective, were nonetheless not wholly outside its bounds, nor did they contain anything irrelevant to the matter at hand. Indeed, they sometimes clothed those discussions in polished phrasing, accessible indication, elegant composition (5), and varied kinds of eloquence that adorned them in the eyes of observers and made them marketable among disputants, along with the scriptural proofs and juristic meanings (6) they embraced, their construction upon principles of jurisprudence and approved maxims (7), and the fact that judgment therein was referred to—