What do the retrieved sources record about maṣāliḥ mursala as a basis of legal reasoning, and whose positions are represented?

On the evidence retained here, maṣāliḥ mursala is discussed in one classical voice and reported about in two modern ones. Four of the ten retrieved passages bear directly on the doctrine, and all four are by Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī: two facing pages of Shifāʾ al-Ghalīl, one page of al-Mankhūl, and one page of al-Mustaṣfā.

In Shifāʾ al-Ghalīl he records that the congruent (mulāʾim) suitable factor is accepted by agreement among those who reason by qiyās, that the disagreement runs on the congruent factor for which no specific precedent testifies - what he says jurists call al-istidlāl al-mursal - and that Mālik's school inclines toward following the maṣāliḥ mursala while al-Shāfiʿī's opinion on it wavers; the same passage immediately narrows the field by adding that the 'strange' factor with no precedent is rejected with no known disagreement.

Al-Mankhūl defines al-mursal as that for which no ruling in the Law is found to fit it, and reports 'al-Qāḍī' - not further identified on the retrieved page - among those who deny istidlāl, arguing at al-Shāfiʿī from Mālik's use of it in penalties.

Al-Mustaṣfā carries both things at once: its bracketed heading files istiṣlāḥ as the fourth of the 'supposed sources', while the body of the same page records that the scholars disagreed over following al-maṣlaḥa al-mursala, divides maṣlaḥa three ways by the Law's testimony, and grants that the kind the Law attests is a proof - the supplied text stops there, before the unattested kind is treated.

Two further passages are front matter, not the classical author's words: both come from the editor's introduction to al-Baghawī's al-Tahdhīb (the editor is not recorded in the source record), where the maṣāliḥ mursala are listed as one route of ijtihād and Mālik is said to have often built rulings on them.

One more is a modern foreword to al-Juwaynī's Nihāyat al-Maṭlab, given in its own section heading as by Yūsuf al-Qaraḍāwī, which speaks of al-Juwaynī giving free rein to al-maṣlaḥa al-mursala and of al-Ghazālī reformulating 'this theory', later expanded by al-Shāṭibī. The remaining three records match the search terms only lexically: two pages of al-Bāqillānī's al-Taqrīb wa-l-Irshād use istiṣlāḥ in a theological sense of bringing about welfare, and one page of al-Ḥuṣrī al-Qayrawānī's adab collection Jamʿ al-Jawāhir uses istiṣlāḥ and maṣāliḥ in everyday senses.

So the positions represented are: al-Ghazālī's own reporting; Mālik and al-Shāfiʿī, only as al-Ghazālī and the two modern texts report them; an unidentified 'al-Qāḍī' as a denier of istidlāl, again only as al-Ghazālī reports him; al-Juwaynī only as a modern foreword characterises him; and two modern reference statements. No Mālikī work, and no text by Mālik or al-Shāfiʿī, is among the sources consulted, so nothing here corroborates those attributions independently of al-Ghazālī and the modern front matter.