evidence that gives them certainty, even if the scholar possesses evidence that gives him certainty.

This principle I have stated is of great importance, so let no one divert the knowledgeable believer from it. Because unquestioning adherence, ignorance, and conjecture are so widespread among those associated with jurisprudence, issuing fatwas, and adjudication, those speculative theologians have presumed superiority over them. They have even excluded jurisprudence—in which we find every branch of knowledge—from the very category of knowledge, because of the unquestioning adherence and conjecture they have observed among its practitioners.

What further clarifies this principle is that probable judgments generally concern questions subject to independent judgment and disagreement. In matters of faith and consensus, however, knowledge is certainly more prevalent.

Accordingly, it is well known that some of the most prominent disagreements among the Companions and those who came after them concerned inheritance: the grandfather’s inheritance and its subsidiary questions; kalāla; the reduction of the mother’s share in the presence of two brothers; the two ʿUmarī cases—a husband and both parents, or a wife and both parents; whether the grandfather takes the father’s place in these cases; whether sisters become residuary heirs alongside daughters; and cases in which