without even knowing who the questioner was. He has issued an erroneous ruling—he said such-and-such, whereas the correct verdict is this-and-that. Al-Ḥasan ibn Ziyād was mistaken.” In this way they would proclaim their own errors whenever they realized they had overstepped the bounds of the Sacred Law.

Imām Abū Ḥanīfah—the Great Imām—and the other leading jurists all had opinions that they later retracted. Imām Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal, in fact, was the foremost among people in withdrawing earlier views whenever new knowledge reached him. Their reason was simple: they purified their religion. They did not belong to any faction, nor did they worship out of desire, greed, or fear. Their sole aim was to bring about Allah’s guidance and to clarify His law. For that reason these imams are the exemplars for humankind—those of the present, the past, and those yet to come—until Allah inherits the earth and everyone upon it, and He is the best of inheritors.

His view on ijtihād, on the would-be mujtahids, and on the matters that deserve independent reasoning

It is a source of great joy when people emerge who possess both the qualifications and the tools of ijtihād, so that they can exercise independent reasoning today and tomorrow regarding new events and circumstances that puzzle scholars seeking to derive their rulings and to determine their standing in relation to what Allah has allowed or forbidden. If those would-be mujtahids truly have a field for ijtihād, they should not spend their effort refuting questions that have already been subject to ijtihād and upon which the community has long proceeded. Rather, they should apply themselves to the fresh issues—the deeds and practices whose rulings scholars have yet to extract and situate within what Allah has permitted or prohibited. Hence a person should not fall into a two-fold shortcoming: declaring a learned scholar ignorant, and at the same time speaking out of ignorance himself. That is a serious deficiency.