the coming of this Day of yours?’ They will say, ‘Yes, but the decree of punishment has become binding upon the disbelievers.’”

However, dispute arises when an act, an occurrence or a practical legal question is addressed by a revealed text that the legally accountable person has no means of knowing or understanding. For example, the relevant Prophetic hadith may be known to someone of whom the jurist is unaware, with nothing known to him that would lead him to it; or its import may be too obscure for the jurist to understand. The same applies when there is no revealed text on the matter at all.

A group of speculative theologians, such as Abū ʿAlī, Abū Hāshim, al-Qādī Abū Bakr and al-Ghazālī, adopted an innovated position concerning matters open to juristic reasoning that resembles the position of antinomian heretics concerning matters explicitly addressed by revealed texts. They maintain that there is no objective ruling with Allah concerning such an occurrence. Rather, the ruling applicable to each legally accountable person follows his own juristic reasoning and belief: whoever believes an act to be obligatory is obliged to perform it, and whoever believes it to be forbidden is forbidden to perform it. They based this on two premises:

The first: A ruling exists only through divine address. Where there is no such address, Allah has no ruling concerning the matter. Thus, if reason establishes no ruling concerning it—either because reason never establishes rulings at all, or because it establishes none in this particular case—it follows that there is no ruling which one person correctly identifies and another mistakenly misses.

The second: It is known that whoever believes something to be obligatory must perform it, and whoever