with the four Imāms, is entirely a mistaken one. The right to differ with the highest of men below the Holy Prophet is a Muslim’s birthright, and to take away that right is to stifle the very existence of Islām. Under the present circumstances, when conditions have quite changed and the world has been moving on for a thousand years, while the Muslims have more or less stagnated, it is the duty of Muslim states and Muslim peoples to apply their own judgment to the changed conditions, and find out the ways and means for their temporal salvation. In fact, the closing of the door on the free exercise of judgment, and the tendency to stifle independence of thought which took hold of the Muslim world after the third century of Hijrah, was condemned by the Holy Prophet himself who said: “The best of the generations is my generation, then the second and then the third; then will come a people in which there is no good.”16 And again he said: “The best of this community (ummah) are the first of them and the last of them; among the first of them is the Messenger of Allāh, and among the last of them is Jesus, son of Mary,17 and between these is a crooked way, they are not of me nor am I of them.”18

The three generations in the first ḥadīth refer to three centuries, the first century being the century of the Companions, since the last of them died at the end of the first century after the Holy Prophet and the second and third being those of the next two generations known as Tābi‘īn and taba‘ Tābi‘īn. As a matter of fact, we find that while independence of thought was freely exercised in the first three centuries, and even Muḥammad and Abū Yūsuf, the immediate followers of Abū Ḥanīfah, did not hesitate to differ with their great leader, rigidity became the rule thereafter with only rare exceptions. The time when independence of thought was not exercised is, therefore, denounced by the Holy Prophet himself, as the time of a crooked company.