an opponent of the consensus or of the Sunnah. What Isḥāq really meant was that when those three imams concur on an issue, the truth is, for the most part, with them—just as we say today that it is scarcely conceivable that the correct view should lie in something all four leading mujtahid imams have unanimously rejected. At the same time, we admit that their agreement on a question does not by itself amount to the ummah’s ijmāʿ, and we are reluctant to assert that the truth lies against a position on which they are all united.

Among the unusual rulings in which al-Awzaʿī stood alone is his view that the thigh is not ʿawrah in the public bath, while it is ʿawrah in the mosque. He has many other fine, independent opinions recorded in the major works. Indeed, he once had a distinct and well-known school of law that the jurists of Syria followed for a time, as did the jurists of al-Andalus, until it eventually disappeared.

Sulaymān ibn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān reported that ʿUqbah ibn ʿAlqamah al-Bayrūtī said:
“They tried to appoint al-Awzaʿī to the judiciary, but he refused and declined, so they left him alone.”

Al-Awzaʿī said, “Whoever remembers death often will find a little sufficient, and whoever realises that his speech counts among his deeds will speak little.”

Abū Ṣāliḥ, the scribe of al-Layth, transmitted from al-Hiql ibn Ziyād, from al-Awzaʿī that he once preached, saying:
“People! Draw strength from the blessings in which you awake to flee from the Fire of Allah, ever-kindled, which rises up to the hearts. You dwell in a world where the stay is brief; you are travellers, to be followed by other generations. Those who have already left this world after enjoying its bloom were longer-lived than you, stronger in body, and greater in their works: they reshaped the mountains, hewed through the rocks (1), and bored through the lands, aided by overwhelming might and bodies like pillars. Yet it was only a matter of days and nights before their allotted span was folded up, their traces effaced, their homes emptied, and their memory erased: ‘So you perceive none of them, nor do you hear from them …’”