These include al-Ḥallāj...

These include al-Ḥallāj, Suhrawardī, Uways al-Qaranī, Qanbar, Maytham al-Tammār and, among the followers of ‘Alī, the very Imāms, of which the most tragic case was that of al-Ḥusayn, sayyid al-shuhadā’ [the Lord of Martyrs].[^7] Is it not clear that all of these deaths were the consequence of emphatic and arbitrary decisions?

In any event, we have made no attempts to deny or to justify the persecution of those who were accused or suspected of heresy as this goes beyond the scope of this study.[^8] On the contrary, our goal here has been to demonstrate that the concept of consensus as a type of council is an erroneous misrepresentation of the function of ijmā‘ in Islām. In the Muslim tradition, the concept of consensus does not express an accepted mode of controlling heresy or the unanimous authority of…