The Imams’ Methodology of Inference from the Qur’an

The importance of methodology is resulted from the efficacy of method in success and failure of a research. Just as method is important in research, so also methodology, as a second grade science, is effective in judgment, selection, and emulation of methods. One of the fields requiring methodology is the Imams’ inference from the Qur’an. If we accept the presupposition that the Imams have inferred legal rulings from the Qur’an, then the question would arise as to what procedure they have used to draw their inferences. What principles and rules have they employed? And what characteristics exist in their procedures? Having been organized in a descriptive-analytical method, this research is intended to answer to these questions and to try, as far as possible, to explain the Imams’ features of inference methods. The achievement this research has made is that the Imams’ inferences have been based on specific presuppositions concerning the Qur’an and other than the Qur’an and have used various rules, whose common grounds have been their rationality and some of which have not been discussed in preliminary sciences of legal reasoning (ijtihād). Therefore, the Imams can be considered as the founders of sharī‘a inference rules.