Muhammad Sallam Madkur says...

Muhammad Sallam Madkur says, “Imitating the Sahabah in general and `Umar, the caliph, in particular who very frequently replaced some of the religious laws with others claiming having taken the advantage in consideration and interpreted the holy texts in a way compatible to the advantage, the generation that came next issued verdicts that were in violation of the Holy Sunnah, such as the permissibility of pricing of the goods although the Holy Prophet obviously prohibited such.

On violating the Holy Prophet’s instruction, they claimed that because people exceeded all limits, they have to be restrained through pricing their commodities.”[^3] Further, `Abd al-Wahhab Khallaf says, “When the men of legislation (among the Sahabah) existed in large numbers, disagreement in some of the religious laws occurred. In a definite incident, they gave various opinions.

As a matter of fact, such disagreements were necessarily expected, because each one of those issuers of verdicts had his own scope of understanding the holy text and thus his own viewpoint since they did not comprehend the Holy Sunnah in the same degree and, definitely, some of them were present during a certain event from which others were absent.

Moreover, the advantages on the basis of which a verdict was issued were not estimated in the same way for the difference in the environments in which those authoritative individuals lived. For these reasons, miscellaneous judgments were issued in a certain issue. The scope of disagreement between the authoritative men of legislation expanded more and more during the second century (of Hijrahh) when a class of mujtahids came into sight in the Muslim community.

However, in addition to the three aforesaid reasons beyond the disagreement among the Sahabah in issuing religious judgments, the reasons beyond the disagreement among the mujtahids of the second century were too many. Some of them were related to the sources of the legislation, the various tendencies of the Muslims and the linguistic principles upon which the understanding of the holy texts relied.

On this account, the disagreement was not only in the verdicts and the secondary religious laws but also in the bases and plans of the legislation itself.