Even qualified scholars were to make decisions based strictly on qiyas or analogical reasoning, the method Khalifa Omar used to discover the punishment for drinking (and to make many other rulings). That is, for each unprecedented contemporary situation, scholars had to find an analogous one in classical sources and derive a judgment parallel to the one already made. And if ambiguities arose about the way to apply qiyas, the matter was settled by ijma, the consensus of the community—which really meant the consensus of all the recognized scholars of the time.
