the four imams, most of whom divided speech into literal and figurative usage.”
He is told:
There is no doubt that this division appears in the books of the Mu‘tazilah and those who learned from them or resembled them, and that most of these scholars mentioned it. But the same is not true of those who did not belong to these groups.
He is then told:
Among these men there is no imam of the Muslims who devoted himself to deriving rulings from the evidence of revelation. Accordingly, those who compiled works recording the differing opinions of scholars qualified to exercise independent legal judgment and engaged in deriving rulings from scriptural evidence do not mention any of these men among them. Those scholars possess the fullest knowledge of the principles of jurisprudence and are most deserving of the title “legal theorist” in its praiseworthy sense. Yet none of them divided speech into literal and figurative usage.
If, however, he means the later scholars known for this division—the Mu‘tazilah and other speculative theologians, together with the jurists who followed their approach in this matter—he is told:
There is no doubt that most of these men adopted this division. But among them there is no imam in any of the Islamic disciplines: neither Quranic exegesis, hadith, jurisprudence, Arabic language, nor grammar. Indeed, the leading grammarians and scholars of Arabic, such as al-Khalīl, Sībawayh, al-Kisā’ī, al-Farrā’ and their peers, Abū ‘Amr ibn al-‘Alā’, and Abū