He replied:
All praise is due to Allah, Lord of the worlds. Al-Bukhārī and Abū Dāwūd are imams in jurisprudence qualified to exercise independent legal judgment. As for Muslim, al-Tirmidhī, al-Nasā’ī, Ibn Mājah, Ibn Khuzaymah, Abū Ya‘lā, al-Bazzār and others like them, they follow the approach of the scholars of hadith. They do not follow the authority of any one particular scholar, nor are they imams exercising unrestricted independent legal judgment. [Rather, they incline towards the views of the imams of hadith] (*) such as al-Shāfi‘ī, Ahmad, Ishāq, Abū ‘Ubayd and others like them.
Some have a particular association with certain imams, as Abū Dāwūd and others do with Ahmad ibn Hanbal. They incline more towards the schools of the scholars of the Hijāz—such as Mālik and others like him—than towards those of the scholars of Iraq—such as Abū Hanīfah and al-Thawrī.
As for Abū Dāwūd al-Tayālisī, he predates all of these. He belongs to the generation of Yahyā ibn Sa‘īd al-Qattān, Yazīd ibn Hārūn al-Wāsitī, ‘Abd Allāh ibn Dāwūd, Wakī‘ ibn al-Jarrāh, ‘Abd Allāh ibn Idrīs, Mu‘ādh ibn Mu‘ādh, Hafs ibn Ghiyāth, ‘Abd al-Rahmān ibn Mahdī and others like them from the generation of Imam Ahmad’s teachers. All of these hold the Sunnah and hadith in high esteem. Some of them incline towards the school of