taken by their followers. In that introduction I stated explicitly that one may affiliate himself to a particular school provided that, whenever a sound hadith reaches him, he gives it priority over mere imitation. I can briefly sum the matter up as follows:

Affiliation to one of the imams, as a means of learning the rulings from the Book and the Sunnah that might otherwise escape a student of knowledge, is something inevitable—legally and factually—for whatever is indispensable to the fulfilment of an obligation is itself obligatory. Thus both the early and later generations proceeded: each received knowledge from the other. The later generations, however—save only a few—departed from the way of the early ones when they turned the means into an end. They ruled that every Muslim, no matter how high he rises in knowledge of the religion of Allah and His Messenger after the four imams, must imitate one of them and never depart from him, just as one of them versified:

“Obligatory is the imitation of a single eminent scholar among them.”

The consequence was that each person became fanatically attached to his own madhhab, forgetting that the madhhab is only a means and that the true goal is to follow the Book and the Sunnah. The goal was effaced from their minds; they cast the Qur’an behind their backs, clung to the school as a religion, and championed it against the authentic Sunnah. Whenever you present one of them with a sound hadith, he turns away and keeps his distance. Strangely, some of them excuse this by saying, “We are captives of the texts”—meaning the statements of the scholars, despite the contradictions and disagreements those statements contain within a single madhhab, let alone among different madhhabs.

We replied: so are we, but with a decisive difference. We are captives of the infallible texts of the Book and the Sunnah, preserved from contradiction and confusion—“Had it been from other than Allah, they would surely have found in it much discrepancy” (Qur’an 4:82). You, on the other hand, are captives of texts that differ and conflict greatly; even the most seasoned specialist among you in derivative jurisprudence is baffled when he tries to reconcile them or to give preference to one of their competing interpretations.