of their very legal foundations, devising principles of their own—though they had no right to do so while claiming to be mere followers—and, worse still, principles that run counter to the explicit texts of the Quran and the Sunnah. They introduced them only to impose on themselves the obligation of imitating the Imams in all subsidiary matters, in flat contradiction to the Imams’ earlier instructions. Accordingly, they alleged that “the fully independent mujtahid no longer exists,”1 and it became a by-word among them that the gate of ijtihad was closed after the fourth Islamic century—a view echoed by Ibn ʿĀbidīn in his marginal notes ⦗1/551⦘. By this claim they barred Muslims from deriving understanding directly from the Book and the Sunnah and made it mandatory to follow one of the four Imams, as al-Jawharah puts it:

‘It is obligatory to imitate one of those eminent scholars;
Thus have the people reported, in wording plain to grasp.’

They went on to assert that the disciplines of hadith and fiqh have “ripened and burnt out.”2 They reinforced and fortified this notion with the statement of Abū al-Ḥasan al-Karḫī: “Every verse that conflicts with what our companions hold is to be interpreted away or deemed abrogated, and every hadith that likewise conflicts is to be interpreted or considered abrogated.”3 Hence, whenever you bring them a verse or a hadith, they allow themselves to dismiss it instantly, without reflecting on its purport or even verifying whether it truly contradicts the school, retorting: “Are you more knowledgeable, or is the madhhab?”

The sectarian adherents’ violation of their Imams’ teachings by fostering fanatic partisanship and enforcing taqlid:
With these self-made rules—rules opposed to the very counsels their Imams had given them—they