By this point in the series, two claims should be clear. First, the familiar picture of early Islamic legal history as a battle between ahl al-raʾy and ahl al-ḥadīth, resolved only through al-Shāfiʿī’s “Great Synthesis,” exaggerates the distance between these camps. Second, figures commonly cast as archetypes—whether rationalists or traditionalists—turn out, on closer inspection, to be methodologically closer than later narratives suggest.
Yet acknowledging this proximity does not mean that the two approaches ultimately merged into a single, unified method. A closer look at post-convergence jurisprudence shows that important differences persisted, especially in how jurists evaluated hadith.
Christopher Melchert’s account improves on Hallaq’s dramatic narrative by emphasizing gradual convergence rather than abrupt synthesis. Jurists associated with ahl al-raʾy increasingly adopted hadith as the primary material of law, learned methods of isnād comparison, and took up hadith criticism to resolve contradictions. At the same time, ahl al-ḥadīth jurists refined their legal reasoning, employing dialectical tools and accepting a division of labor between transmission and jurisprudence.
Yet this description risks overstating how far the convergence went. While Ḥanafī jurists did adopt many traditionist techniques, they did not abandon the raʾy-based criteria by which they evaluated legal evidence. What emerged was overlap, not unification.
One of the clearest indicators that a full synthesis never occurred is the Ḥanafī principle of taʿummu bihi al-balwā—the idea that matters of widespread, unavoidable concern cannot rest on solitary reports (āḥād). If the Prophet had legislated a binding rule on such an issue, knowledge of that ruling would necessarily have circulated widely among the Companions.
A well-known example concerns reports suggesting that touching a woman invalidates ritual purity (wuḍūʾ). While such reports are accepted by many traditionist jurists, the Ḥanafīs rejected them. Their reasoning was not a denial of hadith authority, but a judgment about transmission and practice. Touching one’s spouse is an ordinary, recurring aspect of daily life. Had it invalidated wuḍūʾ, the ruling would have been publicly known, widely practiced, and uncontested. Its transmission through only a handful of reports signaled, for the Ḥanafīs, that it lacked legal force.
Here, raʾy does not override revelation; it evaluates the plausibility of transmission in light of communal reality.
This example reflects a deeper methodological divide. Even after adopting isnād criticism, Ḥanafī jurists continued to distinguish between external defects in transmission (al-inqiṭāʿ al-ẓāhir) and internal indicators (al-inqiṭāʿ al-bāṭin)—such as conflict with general legal principles or established practice.
A hadith could be rejected not because its chain was weak, but because its content clashed with inductively derived norms of the Qurʾān and Sunna. These raʾy-based evaluative criteria had no equivalent in traditionist methodology and remained operative long after the supposed convergence.
Describing this process as a “Great Synthesis” obscures more than it reveals. What occurred was not the replacement of two opposing systems with a unified third, but a gradual narrowing of distance between approaches that were already closer in practice than later polemics suggest.
Jurists borrowed techniques, shared vocabularies, and responded to common scholarly pressures. But they did not surrender their distinct ways of reasoning. The result was convergence without collapse.
This also casts doubt on the usefulness of the labels ahl al-raʾy and ahl al-ḥadīth themselves. As Joseph Schacht noted, these were not self-conscious schools with fixed boundaries, but often polemical designations. Treating them as polar opposites exaggerates difference; treating their interaction as a completed synthesis overstates unity.
A spectrum model captures proximity better—but only if it resists assuming an endpoint of full convergence.
How we tell the story of Islamic law’s origins shapes how we imagine the tradition today. If the law emerged from rupture resolved by synthesis, then disagreement appears as deviation. If, however, it emerged from proximity, overlap, and negotiated difference, then plurality is original—not a problem to be solved.
The early jurists were not choosing between reason and tradition. They were negotiating how transmitted texts function within lived legal reality. Recognizing this yields a more historically honest—and intellectually usable—inheritance.
Islamic legal theory, then, is neither a battlefield nor a monolith. It is a tradition of disciplined disagreement, calibrated reasoning, and enduring diversity.
This study has argued that the conventional narrative of early Islamic legal history—framed as a sharp opposition between ahl al-raʾy and ahl al-ḥadīth, resolved through al-Shāfiʿī’s “Great Synthesis”—overstates both the depth of the original divide and the extent of its eventual resolution. While modern scholarship has already begun to move away from a rigid dichotomy, the prevailing accounts still tend to assume that convergence entailed a substantive merger of methods. A closer examination of legal doctrine, however, suggests otherwise.
By analyzing Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal’s legal reasoning as preserved in the Masāʾil of Isḥāq b. Manṣūr al-Kawsaj, this paper has shown that even the most celebrated traditionist of the third/ninth century employed analogical reasoning in practice. Aḥmad consistently extrapolated underlying principles from Prophetic precedents and extended them to novel cases involving labor contracts, agency, bequests, and transfers of ownership. His use of analogy complicates portrayals of him as radically opposed to “human reasoning” and calls into question the claim that later Ḥanbalīs departed from his method by adopting qiyās. Rather than a rupture, their systematization appears as a development of reasoning already present in Aḥmad’s jurisprudence.
At the same time, the paper has argued that acknowledging this proximity does not entail affirming a full synthesis. Drawing on Ḥanafī legal theory, particularly criteria such as taʿummu bihi al-balwā and internal indicators of textual weakness (al-inqiṭāʿ al-bāṭin), it has shown that raʾy-based evaluative frameworks continued to play a decisive role in hadith assessment even after the widespread adoption of traditionist techniques. While Ḥanafīs increasingly relied on hadith and employed isnād criticism, they did not relinquish their distinctive criteria for determining legal authority. This persistent divergence indicates that convergence occurred at the level of tools and vocabulary, not at the level of underlying epistemic commitments.
These findings suggest that the development of Islamic legal theory is better understood as a process of gradual convergence without collapse. Jurists associated with both ahl al-raʾy and ahl al-ḥadīth responded to shared intellectual pressures, borrowed methods from one another, and narrowed their differences over time. Yet they did not arrive at a single, unified method of legal reasoning. The continued operation of raʾy-based principles alongside traditionist hadith criticism reveals a legal culture characterized by calibrated disagreement rather than synthesis.
Reframing the history in this way has broader implications. It challenges narratives that cast plurality as a later aberration or a problem resolved through methodological unification. Instead, it suggests that diversity in legal reasoning was constitutive of the tradition from an early stage. The early jurists were not divided between “reason” and “tradition” as mutually exclusive options; they were negotiating how transmitted texts, communal practice, and interpretive judgment function together in the production of law.
In this light, the opposition between ahl al-raʾy and ahl al-ḥadīth appears less as a clash of incompatible schools than as a spectrum of methodological emphases within a shared legal project. The history of Islamic legal theory, then, is not one of dramatic rupture followed by synthesis, but of enduring plurality managed through disciplined reasoning—a feature that remained central to the tradition well beyond its formative period.
