Three Traditions, Three Different Reasons for the Same Refusal

Rejecting qiyas did not require agreeing on why it should be rejected, and three quite different traditions arrived at the same negative conclusion from separate premises. The Zahiris refused it as an illegitimate substitute for scripture's own explicit wording, trusting only what the text plainly said. Twelver Shia jurisprudence rejects qiyas for a different reason entirely: Moojan Momen's history of Twelver doctrine explains that the school relies instead on aql, disciplined rational inference from premises the tradition already holds certain, which its jurists distinguish sharply from analogy's method of reasoning by resemblance between two textual cases, arguing that the Imams' own transmitted guidance made reasoning by resemblance unnecessary where reasoning from settled premises was available. Quranism goes further than either, rejecting not only qiyas but the entire body of hadith literature that Zahiris and Twelver jurists alike still treat as authoritative alongside the Quran, leaving the text of the Quran itself as the sole source from which any ruling, by whatever method, may be drawn. The three positions share a single negative conclusion, that analogy has no place in deriving God's law, while disagreeing completely about what should be consulted in its place, which is why they are recorded here as three separate traditions holding one shared refusal rather than one shared doctrine.