in speculative theology and delving deeply into it in the manner of the speculative theologians. They claimed to grasp the true nature of things through reason and maintained that nothing knowable escaped their knowledge or lay beyond their ability to comprehend it in precise and definitive terms.”

[Ibn Taymiyyah’s commentary]

I say:

This is precisely the position of those who do not regard what is received through revelation as yielding knowledge, but hold that knowledge is acquired through reason alone, and of those who imagine that their reason alone enables them to know what the revealed laws have brought.

Hence Imam Ahmad’s statement at the beginning of his epistle on the Sunnah, transmitted from him by ʿAbdūs ibn Mālik al-ʿAttār:

“There is no inferential reasoning in the Sunnah; no comparisons are to be drawn for it, nor can it be comprehended by reason.”

He thus explained that what the Messenger—may Allah bless him and grant him peace—brought must not be opposed by drawing comparisons to it. Not everyone can comprehend it through inferential reasoning, nor does one need to establish it by such reasoning; rather, it stands established in its own right. Not everything that is established has a counterpart, and where there is no counterpart, inferential reasoning has no place. Thus, what is expressly stated in the revealed texts, whether reports or commands, requires no inferential reasoning—unlike the approach of those who seek to grasp through their own reason everything the messengers brought and to receive it through inferential reasoning,