all of it, and someone expressed the point well:

“To affirm two opposites in a single state
is the most repugnant type of impossibility.”

If it be asked: Since this report has been shown to be spurious, why did the Imam refuse al-Manṣūr’s request to make the people unite upon his book al-Muwaṭṭaʾ, and why did he not comply?

I reply: The finest account I have encountered is what the ḥāfiẓ Ibn Kathīr cites in his Commentary on the Abridgement of the Sciences of Ḥadīth (p. 31). He relates that Imam Mālik said, “People have already compiled (their knowledge) and reached conclusions about matters we have not reached.”

This, as Ibn Kathīr—may Allah have mercy on him—observed, is a mark of Mālik’s consummate knowledge and fairness.

It is therefore established that disagreement is altogether an evil and not a mercy. Some forms of it bring liability—such as the discord of those fanatically attached to their legal schools—while other forms do not, such as the disagreement among the Companions and the imams who followed them. May Allah gather us in their company and grant us success in following their way.

It thus becomes clear that the Companions’ disagreement is unlike the disagreement of the imitators.

In short: the Companions differed out of necessity, yet they decried disagreement and avoided it whenever they could.

The imitators, on the other hand—despite their ability to escape it, at least to a great extent—neither agree nor strive for agreement; rather, they countenance it. How vast, then, is the gulf between the two kinds of disagreement!

That is the contrast from the angle of its cause. As for the contrast from the angle of its consequence, it is even clearer; for the Companions ﵃—despite their well-known divergences in subsidiary matters—were most scrupulous in preserving the outward appearance