CE among scholars of hadith who held the Qur'an and authentic hadith to be the only acceptable sources of law and creed. At first these scholars formed minorities within existing religious study circles but by the early 9th century had coalesced into a separate movement under the leadership of Ahmad ibn Hanbal. In legal matters, these scholars criticized the use of personal scholarly opinion (ra'y) common among the Hanafi jurists of Iraq as well as the reliance on living local traditions by Malikite jurists of Medina. They also rejected the use of qiyas (analogical deduction) and other methods of jurisprudence such Hiyal (legal deductions) when it gave precedence to Ra'y (individual opinion) over Hadith and was not based on literal reading of scripture. Ahl al-Hadith strongly opposed the practice of Taqlid, which depended on the opinions of past Imams. They prescribed Ijtihad, which relied on the usage of hadiths. The scholars of the Ahl al-Hadith did not standardise themselves into an official mad'hab (legal school) and held diverse juristic approaches. In matters of faith, they were pitted against Mu'tazilites and other theological currents, condemning many points of their doctrines as well as the rationalistic methods they used in defending them. Ahl al-Hadith were also characterized by their avoidance of all state patronage and by their social activism. They attempted to follow the injunction of "commanding good and forbidding evil" by preaching absolute asceticism and at times even launching vigilante attacks to break wine bottles, musical instruments, and chessboards. Convergence of legal schools The next two centuries witnessed a broad convergence of legal methodologies which gave rise to the classical theories of Sunni jurisprudence (uṣūl al-fiqh), which, despite long disputes, share formal similarities. Hanafi and Maliki jurists gradually came to accept the primacy of the Quran and hadith advocated by the Ahl al-Hadith movement , restricting the use of other forms of legal reasoning to interpretation of these scriptures. This "traditionalizing" of legal reasoning is exemplified in the work of Malik's student Al-Shafi‘i, which laid the foundation of the Shafi'i legal school. In turn, Hanbali jurists, who led the traditionalist movement and initially opposed the use of qiyas, gradually came to accept it as long as its application was strictly founded on scriptural sources. During the 14th century, the Ahl al-Hadith school underwent a religious renewal and crystallisation through the polemics and scholarly treatises of the medieval Hanbali polymath and proto-Salafist