Above all, he declared uncompromisingly that no one could know what was right or wrong on their own. They could guarantee their soul’s safety only by following in the footsteps of Mohammed and trusting strictly to revelation. The other schools of Islamic law gave analogical reasoning (qiyas) a high place as a way to discover how the shari’a applied to new situations, but Ibn Hanbal drastically demoted such methods: rely only on Qur’an and hadith, he said.
