Those who subscribed to this view-later to be known as "Ahl...

Those who subscribed to this view-later to be known as "Ahl al­ Sunnah" turned to solve their problems by referring to the Quran and the Sunnah; but they soon realized that it is not at all an easy task to extract all the ahkam of the Shari'ah from express Quranic texts(nusus) and the Sunnah of the Prophet, and that they are not adequate to answer many of the new issues.

This led the Ahl al-Sunnah into finding other ways and sources of ijtihad and to put their trust in the practice of ray and personal judge­ment and to rely on such sources for basing legal conjectures as qiyas (analogy), istihsan, masalih mursalah, istislah, sadd al-dhara'i`, fath al­dhara'i; madhhab al-sahabi, shari`at al-salaf, `urf, istidlal and so on as hujjah (possessing legal validity). This was a sketchy description of what we shall discuss in detail below.

The Factors Which Generated New, Contingent Issues The emergence of new issues after the termination of the period of tashri` depended upon various factors: Natural and ordinary factors related to the day-to-day life of the Muslims. Exceptional or extraordinary factors, like wars. Islamic conquests and victories extended Islamic influence in Asia, Africa and some European regions, and, in this way, diverse cultural traditions stepped into the vast domain of Islam.

On account of this, new requirements and needs were felt in the same proportion, and Islamic fiqh was bound to answer all of them, in addition to presenting appropriate ahkam which could suit different environmental and social conditions. All these factors put strains on ijtihad and made deduction of the laws of Shari ah more difficult for the Sunni community.

This caused the Ahl al-Ray-those who believed in the practice of ray- the Iraqi school of jurisprudence, whose founder was Abu Hanifah al-Nu'man ibn Thabit (80-150/699-767), and a large group of Sunni fuqaha' to reach the conclusion that the express texts (nusus) of the Quran and the Sunnah of the Prophet (S) alone, being limited, cannot provide an answer to the new issues and problems, while the issues of daily life are countless and ever-increasing.

Accordingly, they were forced to rely on an ijtihad based on ray and other such conjectural instruments that were devised before him. This topic will be discussed in the article "Sayr-e ta'rikhi-ye qiyas dar manabi-ye ijtihad" (the Historical development of Qiyas as a Source of Ijtihad).