on independent reasoning and personal opinion, while the Sunnah actually shows them to be mistaken; the one who errs in such matters still earns a single reward. Accordingly, when the erudite Ibn Daqīq al-ʿĪd—may Allah have mercy on him—collected, in a sizable volume, every instance in which each of the four imams departed from an authentic hadith, whether separately or together, he stated at the very beginning that attributing those rulings to the mujtahid imams is forbidden and that the jurists who follow them must learn these issues so that they do not ascribe them to the imams and thereby lie about them (1).

For that reason, sound reports from the four imams—may Allah have mercy on them all—prohibit people from imitating them blindly and instruct them to return to the Book and the Sunnah. I have detailed this at the start of my book “The Prophet’s Prayer Described” and elsewhere, clarifying the balanced position that a Muslim should adopt toward the imams. Abu Ghuddah knows this perfectly well, yet, true to form, he obstinately denies it and imputes to me what he himself knows to be false—Allah will call him to account.

Because of this category of matters in every one of the four schools—let alone in other schools—that contradict the Sunnah, it is impermissible to claim that the schools themselves are the Book and the Sunnah, or that everything found in them, with all its details and mistakes, belongs to our Sacred Law. If Imam Ibn Daqīq al-ʿĪd, as noted above, ruled it unlawful to attribute such rulings to the four imams, how could it ever be permissible to attribute them to the Islamic Sharīʿah itself?

For that reason I absolved Jesus—peace be upon him—from judging by any of the schools when I commented on the statement of Imam Ibn Abī Dhiʾb, the transmitter of the hadith, “How will you be when the son of Mary descends among you and leads you?” Ibn Abī Dhiʾb explained: “He will lead you according to the Book of your Lord and the Sunnah of your Prophet.” I wrote in commentary: