36وَما يَتَّبِعُ أَكثَرُهُم إِلّا ظَنًّا ۚ إِنَّ الظَّنَّ لا يُغني مِنَ الحَقِّ شَيئًا ۚ إِنَّ اللَّهَ عَليمٌ بِما يَفعَلونَMuhammad AsadFor, most of them follow nothing but conjecture: [and,] behold, conjecture can never be a substitute for truth.1 Verily, God has full knowledge of all that they do.Lit., "conjecture can in no wise make [anyone] independent (la yughni) of the truth", i.e., of positive insight obtained through authentic revelation (to which the sequence relates). The people referred to here (and apparently also in the first sentence of verse 53 of this surah) are the agnostics who waver between truth and falsehood. - Some of the great exponents of Islamic Law - foremost among them Ibn Hazm - base on this verse their rejection of qiyas ("deduction by analogy") as a means of eliciting religious laws which are supposedly "implied" in the wording of the Qur'an or of the Prophet's teachings, but not clearly laid down in terms of law. In his commentary on this verse. Razi thus sums up the above view: "They say that every deduction by analogy is a conjectural process and is, therefore, of necessity, inadmissible [in matters pertaining to religion] - for 'conjecture can never be a substitute for truth'." (See also 5:101-102, and the corresponding notes 120-123.)