were he to try to follow Ibn Ḥanbal in Bukhara or Samarkand, the undertaking would be just as difficult: no Hanbali is likely to emerge from there, just as no Maghribi becomes a Hanafi, nor an Indian a Maliki.

In any case, the ultimate recourse is to the jurisprudence of Mālik, for the great majority of his opinions are sound. Had he accomplished nothing beyond rooting out legal ruses and giving due regard to the higher purposes of the Law, that would have sufficed. His school now dominates the Maghrib and al-Andalus, much of Egypt, parts of Syria, Yemen, the Sudan, as well as Basra, Baghdad, Kufa, and portions of Khurasan.

The school of al-Awzāʿī likewise enjoyed wide renown for a time, but its followers eventually dwindled and disappeared; the same is true of the school of Sufyān and the others already named. Today only the four schools remain.

Few people can master even these as they should, let alone attain the rank of independent juristic reasoning.

The adherents of Abū Thawr died out after the third century AH, and only a handful of Dāwūd’s disciples survived; the school of Ibn Jarīr lasted until sometime after the fourth century AH.

The Zaydis maintain a branch-law school in the Ḥijāz and Yemen, yet it is counted among the views of the innovators, alongside the Imāmīs. There is, however, no objection to the school of Dāwūd: it contains fine positions and close adherence to the textual sources, although many scholars pay no heed to his dissent, and he has certain anomalous rulings that have marred his school.

As for the Qāḍī, he cited proof that it is permissible—by consensus—to emulate these scholars, naming the four schools, the Sufyānīs, the Awzāʿīs, and the Dāwūdis. He then said: “These are the ones whom people have unanimously deemed worthy of imitation. Although they differ as individuals, the scholars agree on following them, taking their schools as exemplars, studying their books, deriving law from their proofs, and building subsidiary rulings on their principles—to the exclusion of anyone else, whether earlier or contemporary—for the reasons we have already mentioned.”