four Sunni madhhabs to be one great school of law, offering each believer a range of positions on any issue and thus the choice between relaxed or more stringent rules on any one issue. For him, claims of abrogation were the recourse of those mediocre and narrow-minded jurists whose hearts God had not illuminated with His light. They could not perceive all the interpretive possibilities in the words of God and the Prophet or appreciate that a diversity of opinion was a mercy. By taking the shortcut of stamping Qur’anic verses or Hadiths ‘abrogated,’ such ulama had restricted the interpretive
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