God is a personal being (not an impersonal force). It deals with all the subjects which concern us as human beings: wisdom, doctrine, worship, and law, but its basic theme is the relationship between God and His creatures. The basic form of the Pantheon has changed over the years… Though in this stage the basic foundations of how Islamic law was to be conceptualized were laid, legal theory was still largely absent, and while diversity in authority was accepted, eventually scholars realized that diversity had to be contained otherwise unmitigated diversity would usher in a relativism within law that would undermine its religious purpose. Overall, a majority (55 percent) of college-educated religious Americans report that they are currently a member of a church or other religious organization, compared to 44 percent of religious Americans without a college degree. Roughly one in five baby boomers (17 percent) say they read religious stories or scripture with their families at least once a week growing up. Those people who follow this religious path believe in respecting their elders and believe older people have a strong religious connection with the ancestors.

The idea of religious and moral excellence as being a vision of legitimate rule is taken from Asma Afsaruddin. Therefore, these early schools were very much considered authoritative and legitimate based on the model of authority that recognized precedence and moral excellence of the companions. Given that law is inevitably affected by the context in which it is generated, not only were the legal scholars unique, and their sources of authority different, but their contexts were distinctive. As Islamic intellectual thought progressed, this resulted in the segmentation of disciplines and the specialization of various scholars. In this way, though there was no singular source of authority, within Islam it was possible to state with a certain degree of confidence if someone was authoritative and if their thought was legitimate or normative. I loathed the thought of such ingenious cruelty, and resolved to punish the artificer in kind. There was general agreement that on matters that had decisive or apodictic evidence, there could only be one correct mujtahid.

Opponents of the musawwiba, known as the mukhatti’a argued that regardless of evidence, there is a divine ruling in each instance, and one jurist is correct whereas the others are incorrect. What al-Shāfi‘ī argued was that legal guidance from the Prophet was on the same level as legal guidance from the Qur’an, so in the realm of positive law, the jurist should first turn to the Qur’an and the hadīth before turning to practice of the Companions, consensus of the jurists (ijmā‘), or independent legal reasoning (ijtihād). One group, known as the musawwiba, argued that every mujtahid is correct and that God’s rulings correspond to each mujtahid opinion. First, is every legal scholar (mujtahid) correct in legal matters? And third, is the one correct mujtahid known? As a result, human endeavors to decipher the Divine intent were understood to be one of multiple possible interpretations. Flaws are therefore real and exist in the universe; they are not merely higher divine purposes misunderstood by humans. This loyalty then translates into texts that are written, whether they be commentaries on original texts or new texts. 870) who eventually penned what was to become one of the most authoritative texts of hadīth, the Sahīh al-Bukhārī.

With Sahīh al-Bukhārī, and a few other similar texts, and the Qur’an, the Islamic scriptural canon was considered to be complete. In the second/eighth century then, instead of looking towards collecting and canonizing the sayings of the Prophet immediately after his death, as was done with the formalization of the text of the Qur’an, what arose were local, legal authorities. These four sources of law were the Qur’an, hadīth, juristic consensus (ijmā‘) and independent juristic reasoning (ijtihād). This agreement on legal methodology was coupled with three other phenomena which eventually contributed to the rise and dominance of four legal schools. The foundation of the theory was, of course, agreement on the sources of law. Perhaps what is most noteworthy about this doctrine is the implicit desire of jurists to have agreement on matters that would impact large segments of the Muslim population. The doctrine of consensus was relatively simple – for matters that lacked clear scriptural guidance and were therefore considered epistemically probable, if the jurists of a single era agreed on a legal ruling, that matter would cease being epistemically probable and become epistemically certain.