In scholarly usage, maʿrifah and ʿilm can refer to knowing a matter, affirming its truth, or possessing a trained capacity to reason from legal sources. Thus saying that fiqh is knowledge of rulings does not reduce it to memorizing isolated answers.
A student may know that prayer is obligatory. A jurist must additionally understand what affects that obligation, how its practical details are specified, and how a ruling is reached from evidence. Such enduring competence is described as a faculty of derivation and recall.
Recall (istiḥḍār) is the ability to bring relevant knowledge to bear in context. Derivation (istinbāṭ) is the disciplined movement from evidence to a reasoned ruling. The difference is analogous to knowing an answer and being able to establish why it follows under particular conditions.