[6] Its proponents, which included many early jurists of the Hanafi school, used the term ra'y to refer to "sound" or "considered" reasoning, such as qiyas (analogical deduction).
[5] Their opponents from the Ahl al-Hadith creedal group held that the Quran and authentic hadith were the only admissible sources of Islamic law, and objected to any use of ra'y in jurisprudence, whether in the form of qiyas, istislah (consideration of public interest), or hiyal (legal subterfuges).
[8] Over time, Hanafi jurists gradually came to accept the primacy of the Quran and hadith advocated by the Ahl al-Hadith creedal group, restricting the use of other forms of legal reasoning to interpretation of these scriptures.
The emergence of hadith did not initially affect these established forms of legal reasoning, and ra'y continued to dominate the Islamic world until the mid-8th century CE.
[13] However, starting around the end of the 7th century, there had been a growing movement to codify the sunnah into written hadith, rather than being largely verbally told by scholars and storytellers.
[14] While ra'y was initially the dominant source of Islamic law, this would soon change with the rise of traditionalism (Ahl al-Hadith), as the term got an increasingly negative association with arbitrary or fallible human thought.
[18] After Al-Shafi'i (founder of the Shafi'i school), traditionalism "gained significant strength, attracting many jurists who can easily be described as staunch opponents of rationalism".
[19][20] The Mihna, an 18-year period of persecution against traditionalists, instituted by Abbasid caliph al-Ma'mun, had made its victims like ibn Hanbal emerge as heroes, and its eventual end exemplifying the defeat of the rationalists.
"[4] However, even by the end of the Mihna, a majority of jurists did not fully subscribe to either camp, seeing the traditionalism of ibn Hanbal as too rigid and the rationalism of the Mu'tazila and their supporters as too libertarian.
Extreme traditionalists also moderated, such as Hanbalites accepting limited use of qiyas (an exception being the aforementioned Zahiri school which adamantly refused to join the synthesis).