And yet this view is held by Ahmad ibn Hanbal, Ishāq ibn Rāhawayh, and others. His school survives to this day, and it is also the school of Dāwūd ibn ʿAlī and his followers. Their school survives to this day, so people today have not reached a consensus against this view. Rather, many in both the East and the West uphold it. Neither the Quran nor the Sunnah distinguishes between individual imams qualified to exercise independent legal judgment.

Mālik, al-Layth ibn Saʿd, al-Awzāʿī, and al-Thawrī were all imams in their time. Following the legal authority of any one of them is like following another. No Muslim would say that it is permissible to follow one but not another. However, anyone who prohibits following one of these imams in our time does so for one of two reasons:

The first is his belief that no one remains who knows their schools. Following the legal authority of a deceased scholar is a matter of well-known disagreement. Those who prohibit it say, “These scholars are dead,” while those who permit it say, “There must be someone living who knows the deceased scholar’s position.”

The second is that he says, “A consensus has now been established against this view.” This rests on a familiar question in the principles of Islamic jurisprudence: if the Companions, for example, or the scholars of any other generation differed over an issue, holding two views, and then the Successors or the scholars of the following generation unanimously agreed upon one of them, would this constitute a consensus that supersedes the earlier disagreement? There is well-known disagreement on this question within Ahmad’s school and among other scholars.

For anyone who holds that, once the scholars of the second generation have reached a consensus, it is no longer permissible to adopt the other view, and believes that the scholars of that generation did reach such a consensus, the combination of these two