dies, his resurrection has already begun.”

Yet some Sabian heretics who pursue philosophy, such as al-Suhrawardī of Aleppo, who was put to death, and others, imagine that this is the Resurrection Allah describes in the Quran. They attribute these words to the Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, but that is not the case.

If, because many jurists blindly follow their imams and rely on conjecture, matters that can be known—and that are known to jurists versed in religion and scholars of the Sacred Law—have become confused with other matters, then the same applies to the imams who exercise independent scholarly judgment themselves. Undoubtedly, something may be conjectural or even unknown to one of them, yet known with certainty to another, whose knowledge may either agree with the former’s view or contradict it. There are so many legal questions whose rulings many imams do not know, or about which they speak on the basis of conjecture, whether correctly or incorrectly, while another knows their rulings through evidence that is conclusive both to him and to those who possess the same knowledge.

Sometimes this comes through a text that he alone has heard from the Messenger or from someone else, thereby attaining certain knowledge through numerous factors relating to its transmission. This frequently occurs among hadith scholars: they know texts and derive from them certainty concerning a great many matters