—many times over. They are numerous only because people’s actions are so numerous and varied: these are the things people know in the greatest detail. When something becomes so extensive, each part of it is itself substantial. Anyone who sees these questions set down in writing forms an impression of nothing beyond them. Similarly, someone reading histories of people and civil strife, presented as an uninterrupted narrative, gains the impression that such events have always occurred continuously in the world. Yet what is recorded is one thing, while what actually happens encompasses many things. The same applies to people’s actions and the rulings governing them, but most people do not know this.

This is readily apparent in those who pursue other disciplines without studying jurisprudence. As for those who do study it, most know only the school of their own imam. They may know it in general terms without distinguishing between rulings established with certainty by explicit texts or consensus and those peculiar to their imam, or those widely subject to independent juristic reasoning. Thus, we find such a person issuing fatwas on matters established by explicit texts and consensus in precisely the same manner as on matters of juristic reasoning and disagreement—like a donkey carrying a book, merely conveying what has been transmitted. Indeed, one of them may be told that someone else’s school holds a contrary position, and he accepts this as permissible, even though disagreement on that matter is inconceivable among the religious communities, let alone among Muslims.

Reports of this kind have reached me concerning people renowned for issuing fatwas and serving as judges. They even told the ruler of their country that, according to al-Shāfi‘ī’s school, a woman divorced three times becomes lawful again through a marriage contract without consummation. Yet even the children of the Shāfi‘ī school know that this is a matter on which his school has never differed. They even report that Mālik permits temporary marriage, yet there is none among