Such ignorance! Worse still is the excuse he offers for that ignorance: he imagines that a consensus has been reached in open defiance of the Sunnah. This betrays an evil opinion of the Muslim community, for he is accusing them of having unanimously agreed to oppose the Sunnah of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ. More repugnant yet is the very basis of his claim to consensus—his own ignorance and his failure to know the scholars who upheld the hadith. In the end he has simply put his ignorance ahead of the Sunnah. Allah alone is the One whose help is sought.

I say: If this is the condition of someone who contradicts the Sunnah while thinking that the scholars are unanimously against it, what is to be said of the one who rejects it knowing full well that many scholars have affirmed it, and that those who oppose it have no proof except such rules as have already been mentioned, or mere blind imitation, as will be discussed in the fourth chapter?

The Cause of the Error in Preferring Analogy and Derived Principles over the Hadith
In my estimation, the root of their mistake in preferring those rules to the Sunnah is twofold: first, they regard the Sunnah as occupying a rank lower than the one Allah, exalted is He, has assigned to it; and second, they entertain doubts about its authenticity. Otherwise, how could they dare to place analogy ahead of it, knowing that analogy rests on opinion and ijtihād and is liable to error, as everyone admits? For that very reason analogy is only used in cases of necessity, as al-Shāfiʿī—may Allah have mercy on him—said: “Analogy is not permissible when a report is available.” And how could they give priority to the practice of the people of a particular region over the Sunnah when they know that they have been commanded to refer their disputes to it, as has already been mentioned? And what