based on reason at all, and that doing so was an innovation and a form of speculative discourse condemned by the early generations. This emboldened the former against them, for they saw them refraining from all such reasoning, whether out of inability or ignorance, or because they believed it to be an innovation and no part of religion. The former said to them, “Your refutation of us is also an innovation, for the early generations and the imams did not offer the sort of refutation you have offered.” They thus began saying of these people that they rejected rational arguments and did not accept reasoning.

Those speculative theologians agreed with groups of polytheists, Sabians, Magians, and other philosophers among the Romans, Indians, Persians, and others on what they deemed rational, employing analogical reasoning within it sometimes for truth and sometimes for falsehood. The negligence and transgression of these groups caused division and disagreement within the Muslim community, which this is not the place to discuss.

The religion of Islam is the middle way: it is truth and justice. It encompasses what rightly deserves to be considered rational and what ought to be understood and known. It is free of the ignorance, error, inability, and other failings into which those who deviate have fallen. Thus, alongside adducing evidence from the revealed texts and scholarly consensus, Imam Ahmad and others also reasoned from the innate disposition and sound rational analogies incorporating a fortiori reasoning.