a particular person whom neither God nor His Messenger specified, and whom neither the apparent sense of a Book nor any sound or weak Sunnah indicated. They prevented him from seeking a concession in his case in another scholar’s school, yielded by that scholar’s exertion of judgment, and were stringent in this.
They said, “This leads to playing with religion,” imagining that this was religion, whereas the Prophet, may God bless him and grant him peace, said, “God has given you charity, so accept His charity.”
Concessions are among what God has charitably given His servants. We agree upon confirming the ruling of one exercising judgment and the layperson’s following him in that ruling, for he holds it through proof from revealed law, whether he employs analogy or does not affirm it.
The concession al-Shafiʿi held in his school according to what his proof required has been confirmed by revealed law. Yet a Maliki mufti prevents a follower of the Maliki school from taking al-Shafiʿi’s concession, through which the Lawgiver has required his worship. We attribute it to the Lawgiver only because revealed law confirmed it. He prevents him from taking what proof requires through a baseless matter not required by proof: a man’s binding himself to a particular school without departing from it to another. He prohibits to him what revealed law has not prohibited.
This is among the greatest calamities and hardest burdens upon God’s servants. What revealed law widened by confirming the rulings of this community’s practitioners of judgment, the common run of jurists narrowed.
As for the imams, such as Abu Hanifa
