toward the opinion of al-Ḥasan ibn Ṣāliḥ.

244 – "Reports have also reached me from other lands, besides those I have mentioned, of the very same kind of division I have observed among the people of those regions.

245 – "I saw that the Meccans tend to place ʿAṭāʾ at the forefront of knowledge among the Successors, while in parts of Iraq there are those who give precedence to Ibrāhīm al-Nakhaʿī.

246 – "Once each faction has promoted its own champion, it often goes to extremes in distancing him from the scholars preferred by people of other lands.

247 – "We have witnessed the same behaviour regarding the scholars appointed in our own lifetime.

248 – "Given such disagreements among the cities, I have heard some muftis swear by Allah that So-and-so had no right to issue fatwas because of his deficient intellect and ignorance, while also claiming that another scholar positively had no right to remain silent. Conversely, I have met townsfolk who insisted that this very second man had no right to issue fatwas owing to his ignorance—namely, the one others said must not remain silent because of the superiority of his knowledge and judgment.

249 – "I later found that the people of every town behave in exactly this way toward the scholars of their own age.

250 – "So where have you found these people united upon a single jurist, or upon a general body of jurisprudence? Such, as I have stated, is the view of most of them, and I have been told the same about those who are absent from me. If they were to agree upon a handful of individuals, would you then declare those few to be scholars and accept whatever they agree upon?"

251 – He replied, "Even if they differ, as you claim, because of divergent schools, interpretations, inattentiveness, or rivalry among themselves, I will accept from them only what they have all agreed upon together."