“Great laxity has crept into the reporting of consensuses (ijmāʿs). Someone with scarcely any share of knowledge of the juristic schools now imagines that whatever the scholars of his own school—or even merely of his own region—agree upon is an ijmāʿ. This is a grave corruption: such a transmitter advances a bare claim on a matter that touches every Muslim, heedless of the serious danger that this unverified, non-scrupulous transmission poses to Allah’s servants.

As for the followers of the four schools, they have come to regard whatever they themselves agree upon as a consensus, especially the later scholars among them—such as al-Nawawī in his commentary on Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim—and anyone who follows his example. Yet this is not the ijmāʿ whose binding authority the scholars acknowledged. The best of generations—the first, then those who follow them, and then those who follow them—lived before the appearance of the schools. Moreover, in the lifetime of each of the four Imams there existed a host of leading scholars qualified for independent reasoning, too many to count, and the same has remained true from their time down to this very day. Every knowledgeable and fair-minded person realises this, but fairness is a steep obstacle that only those to whom Allah opens the gates of truth and eases entry can surmount.

Al-ʿAllāmah al-Shawkānī said in Wabl al-Ghamām, his marginal notes on Shifāʾ al-Awām: “The consensuses cited in the books amount to nothing more than the fact that the person citing them was unaware of any disagreement on the issue; but his ignorance of disagreement does not prove its non-existence. All he has thereby is the supposition of a consensus, and the mere supposition of a single individual cannot serve as a valid proof.” ⦗84⦘