if the owner, acting on an interpretation and holding no view other than this one, would not be a wrongdoer, nor would it be permissible to fight him. Rather, if the two disputed, they would submit their case (1) to someone who could adjudicate between them, since one believed that the property belonged to him while the other believed that it belonged to him.

A distinction may also be drawn between someone who usurped grain and then happened to grind it, and someone who intended, by grinding it, to acquire ownership of it (2). Punishing the latter with the opposite (3) of what he intended falls under the principle of blocking the means.

Overall, all these issues that he denounced belong to the school of Abū Hanīfa; none is attributed to anyone else except al-Shāfiī’s ruling concerning the daughter conceived from the fluid (4) of illicit intercourse.

It is therefore said to him:

The Shia maintain that Abū Hanīfa’s school is sounder than the other three schools. They also say that if a person has no choice but to seek a legal opinion from one of the four schools, he should consult the Hanafis. They rank Muhammad ibn al-Hasan above Abū Yūsuf, for their aversion to hadith and the Sunnah makes them recoil from anyone who adheres more closely to hadith and the Sunnah.

If that is so, then these alleged enormities are found in Abū Hanīfa’s school. If his position is the preponderant one among the schools of the four imams, their heaping denunciation upon him rather than the others would be self-contradictory. They would have deemed one school preponderant and preferred it over the others, and then shown it to contain (5)