is a voluntary act.’ He said, ‘al-Shaʿbī is mistaken.’

7 – Saʿīd ibn al-Musayyab was informed of Shurayḥ’s ruling concerning the kātib, whereupon he said, ‘Shurayḥ is in error.’

8 – Hammām related from Qatādah that Iyās ibn Muʿāwiyah accepted the testimony of one man and two women in a divorce case. Qatādah said: al-Ḥasan was asked about this and replied, ‘Women’s testimony is not admissible in matters of divorce.’ The view of al-Ḥasan and the ruling of Iyās were then written to ʿUmar ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz, who wrote back: ‘Al-Ḥasan is correct and Iyās is mistaken.’

Abū ʿUmar Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr said: Cases of this sort are abundant in the scholars’ books, as are the disagreements among the Companions of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, the Successors, and those who came after them. The refutations they addressed to one another are too numerous for any single book to encompass, let alone to gather in a single chapter. The fact that the Companions of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ would sometimes retract their own views in favour of others, and would occasionally declare one another mistaken, is a clear proof that, in their judgment, their differences involved right and wrong. If two mutually opposing positions could both be correct, the early generations would never have faulted one another in their independent reasoning, judgments, and legal opinions; reason itself rejects the notion that a thing and its opposite can both be entirely right. How aptly this has been put:

To affirm two opposites in one state
Is the ugliest of impossibilities.

Ashhab said: I heard Mālik say, ‘The truth is but one; two divergent opinions cannot both be correct. Truth and correctness are only one.’ Ashhab added, ‘Al-Layth holds the same view.’

Abū ʿUmar said: Disagreement in and of itself is not a proof according to any jurist of the ummah that I know of—save for someone devoid of insight and learning, and there is no weight to his statement.