CONSENSUS AND DISAGREEMENT  91

—because one may transmit only what one has heard—in cases where the transmission [on the authority of the Prophet] is only an assumption which may or may not be true: [as to that,] we accept the decision of the public because we follow their authority, knowing that, wherever there are sunnas of the Prophet, their whole body cannot be ignorant of them, although it is possible that some are, and knowing that their whole body cannot agree on something contrary to the sunna of the Prophet and on an error, I trust.’

In confirmation, Shāfiʿī quotes two traditions which state that the Prophet ordered men to hold fast to the community, and which he explains as referring to the consensus. ‘The error comes from separation, but in the community as a whole there is no error with regard to the meaning of the Koran, the sunna, and analogy, I trust.’

Contrary to the old idea of consensus and also to the later system, Shāfiʿī here restricts its function to the interpretation of Koran and sunna and to drawing conclusions from them. He has not succeeded in clarifying his idea of consensus of the community at large, and it remains in an uneasy relationship with the new dominating element, the traditions from the Prophet. Shāfiʿī does not know yet the locus classicus in favour of consensus: ‘My community will never agree on an error.’ As a tradition from the Prophet, it appears only in the time of the classical collections¹, and its wording is directly derived from statements such as that of Shāfiʿī.

Tr. VI contains only one reference to the consensus of the community at large, on p. 265: ‘We know that the Muslims as a body cannot be ignorant of a sunna, whereas it is possible that some, individually, are.’

From Tr. IV onwards, Shāfiʿī rejects the consensus of the scholars explicitly, at least in theory, and even denies its existence.

Tr. IV, 256: Shāfiʿī twice uses the argument of the sorites against the consensus of the majority of scholars.² He considers the alleged consensus of the majority only as a pretext for accepting or rejecting doctrines at pleasure. The consensus of the scholars can never be realized as they are never found together,³ nor can common information (naql al-ʿāmma) be had about them. On p. 257, the opponent asks whether in Shāfiʿī’s view a real consensus exists at all. Shāfiʿī replies: ‘Certainly, there is much in the essential duties on which no one who knows anything will pretend that there is no consensus, and this applies also to certain general principles’; but he defies him to find a consensus when he comes to controversial questions of detail.