—Abū al-Maʿālī al-Juwaynī—during the illness in which he would die at Nishapur, and when we had seated ourselves he said to us, “Bear witness that I have (1) retracted every statement I ever made that ran contrary to what the righteous predecessors—peace be upon them—held, and that I shall die upon the very faith on which the old women of Nishapur die.”

The vast majority of the later (2) scholastic theologians followed in his wake—his students, the students of his students, the students of the students of his students, and those who came after them. Because his knowledge of the Quran, the sunnah, and the words of the early generations of the ummah was limited, he imagined that most new occurrences are not (3) addressed in the Quran and the sunnah, and that there is nothing in the consensus to indicate them (4); their rulings, he maintained, can be known only through qiyās (analogy), as he repeatedly affirms in his books (5). Yet anyone versed in the texts and in how they signify legal rulings realizes that the view of Abū Muḥammad Ibn Ḥazm and others like him—that the texts encompass every occurrence—is nearer to the truth than this opinion, even though their method does involve neglecting some scriptural proofs that may be termed manifest analogy (6), and at times treating indications contained in the wording itself—such as faḥwā al-khiṭāb (argument by stronger implication)—as though they were qiyās.