those earlier imams. We do not follow them out of weakness but out of firm conviction, for they alone merit being taken as exemplars. The imams among the righteous predecessors did not court the favor of rulers, nor did they lend themselves to any ideological campaign [words unclear in the source]. Many of them died persecuted and tortured. Abu Ḥanīfah, according to one report, died under torture in prison because he opposed the ruler.

As for Imām Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal, the torment he endured is beyond imagination. He was flogged with whips too many to count, all so that he would utter a single word about the Qur’an— a formulation the ruler wished to adopt and was pressuring the scholars, chief among them Aḥmad, to endorse. Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal underwent every kind of torture, yet he never budged from his view; he did not sell it for a handful of dirhams to satisfy a summons from the throne. In matters that concerned Allah, no critic’s blame could deter them.

They spoke their opinions plainly, drawing on their knowledge, conviction, and insight; and if they later discovered they were mistaken, they would announce—whether the next day or years afterward—that the opinion was wrong, and they would abandon it as one gives up something of no value. Consider Imām al-Shāfiʿī: he had already founded a broad and detailed madhhab, yet after moving to Iraq and traveling through parts of the Muslim world, new Sunna reports and hadiths of the Prophet reached him—reports he had never encountered before. He thereupon revised his entire ijtihād, almost as though he had repealed his earlier school and established a new one. He cared nothing for people’s comments: “Yesterday he said such-and-such, and today he changes his mind.”

One of Abū Ḥanīfah’s disciples, al-Ḥasan ibn Ziyād, was in a position to whom people turned for fatwas. He once issued a legal opinion, then realized he had erred. He therefore sent a crier through the town proclaiming, “Whoever consulted al-Ḥasan ibn Ziyād about such-and-such…”