= al-Bayhaqi, 2/30. Consensus (ijma) is the agreement of all qualified jurists in a given era on a particular legal ruling. According to al-Shafi‘i, it concerns only those questions that are necessarily known as part of the religion, as he states repeatedly in his works. In al-Risala, no. 1559, he writes: “I never say—nor does any scholar say—that a matter is unanimously agreed upon unless you could never encounter a scholar who would say otherwise, and he would report it from those before him; for example, that the noon prayer consists of four units, that wine is forbidden, and similar cases.” He likewise says in Ikhtilaf al-Hadith, 7/147 (margins of al-Umm): “It is sufficient proof that the claim of consensus regarding every ruling is unfounded, contrary to what some have alleged in this and in many comparable issues. In short, none of the Companions, the Followers, the generation after them, the generation after that, or any scholar I know on the face of the earth—nor anyone whom the public regard as a scholar—has ever claimed consensus on anything beyond the basic obligations incumbent on all Muslims, except on rare occasions when someone asserted something that, to my knowledge, no scholar recognized, and I have preserved from several of them its refutation.” He also says in Jamiʿ al-ʿIlm, pp. 65–66, when asked whether consensus exists: “Yes, by Allah’s grace, it is abundant concerning the essential obligations whose ignorance is unheard of. That is the kind of consensus which, were you to say, ‘People have unanimously agreed,’ you would find no one around you with any knowledge who would deny it.” See Ibn Hazm, al-Ahkam, 4/141 ff. (1) By “broken chain” (munqatiʿ) he means a report transmitted as mursal. Al-Sakhawi states in Sharh al-Alfiyya 1/140: “Al-Nawawi said in al-Irshad: It is well-known among our jurists that the mursal traditions of Saʿid ibn al-Musayyib are authoritative according to al-Shafi‘i; many are unaware of any other view, yet the matter is not so.” He clarifies this in similar terms in Sharh al-Muhadhdhab 1/99, quoting from al-Shafi‘i’s Mukhtasar (also transmitted by al-Rabiʿ): “The mursal reports of Ibn al-Musayyib are sound according to us.” Early Shafi‘i scholars differed over the meaning of this, as related by Shaykh Abu Ishaq in al-Lumaʿ and by al-Khatib in al-Faqih wa-l-Mutafaqqih and al-Kifaya: • One view holds that such reports are proof for al-Shafi‘i, unlike other mursal narrations, because when examined they were found to possess full chains. • The other view maintains that they are not proof for him and stand on the same footing as other mursal reports. They add: al-Shafi‘i merely used a mursal report for preference (tarjih), and preferring on the basis of a mursal narration is permissible. Al-Khatib, in al-Faqih wa-l-Mutafaqqih, declares the second view correct; he deems the first of no value.